Changelog

Merry Christmas, Protoboard community! We’ve been hard at work on Protoboard Alpha, and we’re excited to ship a major canvas upgrade focused on making your boards clearer and more expressive.

Version 2.3.1 introduces Custom Part Geometry, which means parts can finally have real outline shapes instead of all feeling like the same generic rectangle. This makes it easier to visually distinguish parts at a glance, and it makes connections behave more naturally on curved and irregular shapes.

Under the hood, this builds on ProtoPart templates: each template can define an outline using a preset (like a circle) or a custom polyline outline (your own points, optional curved “bulge” segments, and optional corner rounding). Protoboard measures that outline to size the node correctly, and uses it for interaction so handles appear where you expect—on the outline itself.

We’d love your feedback: does Custom Part Geometry make your boards easier to read and connect? What shapes should we prioritize for the library, and what authoring tools would help you most?

New Features

• “Part Geometry” shapes: defaults of “rounded rectangle”, “rectangle”, and “circle”.

• Custom Part Geometry (SVG Outlines): Parts can render using true outline shapes (presets or custom polylines), including curved bulge segments and optional corner rounding—so parts can look more like what they represent.

• Outline-Aware Handles: Hover and drag handles now project to the nearest point on the part’s outline (not just the bounding box), which makes connecting to circles/curves/irregular shapes feel far more natural.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where certain UI views would display “Untitled” for part names instead of their actual name.

Hello Protoboard community! We hope you had a happy Thanksgiving (if you believe in turkeys that is)! Here in Texas, we ate some juicy turkey, stuffing, sliced ham, green bean casserole, rolls, and many other tasty dishes and desserts.

Other than stuffing ourselves with family recipes, we have been super busy serving up the latest version of Protoboard Alpha, and we are excited to announce that version 2.3 introduces many quality-of-life updates that should make building hardware systems inside Protoboard much easier for the developer-minded user.

We have a growing library of components and many of you requested the ability to add custom parts yourself. Under the hood, Protoboard uses a custom language for parts called “ProtoPart” that we are making more transparent and editable inside the app. We have some documentation on our Github: https://github.com/Delta-Robotics-Inc/ProtoPart and will release better information about how to write new parts in your projects and even request to add them to the community library for everyone to use!

If you are not so inclined to write ProtoParts, we also added some simple features for controlling the names of parts and their connections so that you can model parts and interfaces that we don’t support quite yet.

We need your feedback on Protoboard in its current state. How does it help you plan out your next hardware project? Do you need more parts, enhanced visuals, a more powerful validation engine, or what else would help make Protoboard a perfect hardware planning companion? Tell us on discord or here on FeatureBase!

New Features

• Annotations & Notes: Add sticky comments with leaders on the canvas, link notes to parts, and edit them in the new Annotation Inspector.

• Template Library & Code Viewer: Browse both "Library" and "In Project" templates, open any part's ProtoPart JSON source, and pull official updates or work locally. Linked vs. local status is always shown.

• Custom Parts via ProtoPart JSON: Create your own parts in-app using the ProtoPart schema (https://github.com/Delta-Robotics-Inc/ProtoPart), import/export as JSON, and preview templates before placing them.

  

• Smarter Harnesses: Name harnesses yourself or let Protoboard auto-name from the interface; harness edges now show friendly display names.

  

• Swapping Templates: You can change the template type for parts on your board with a simple dropdown, and we have a nice UI flow that helps you migrate the part’s existing interfaces to the new template.

• Faster Part Setup: "Add blank" and "Request part" live in the library list and loading states for parts make placements clearer.

Improvements

• Canvas polish with annotation and note-edge types, better zoom defaults, and refreshed orange theming.

• Refined template cards and action menus with status badges, version info, and variant/details at a glance.

• Project flows now support pasting JSON directly to open a project; header and shell remember layout choices and show selection context.

• Pulling official templates is faster with reduced authentication friction.

Bug Fixes

• "Add Your First Part" no longer blocks part placement.

Next Steps

We will focus on documenting how to build systems with Protoboard, as the app now supports both basic and complicated workflows and we need help deciding on the future direction of Protoboard!

Coming soon: Custom part shapes (make the motor look like a motor), undo/redo/copy-paste, and manual price/source fields for BOMs.

Further Out: Protoboard is getting closer to being ready for an AI agentic integration to handle writing custom components for you, processing datasheets, and helping evaluate your project using our compatibility system and internet tools. We really believe that AI when combined with a powerful systems engineering engine like Protoboard will be the ultimate hardware design companion for beginners and professionals alike!

This version fixes major BOM-related bugs:

• All in-project protoparts now load successfully when opening boards

• Parts with unknown prices show "-" instead of “?”

• More stable BOM generation and export functionality

Introduces a persistent validation panel in the left sidebar:

• No need to click the navbar validate button

• Submit project validations directly from the sidebar

• All validation features work identically to the former navbar button

Here are some technical improvements this version introduces:

• Centralized validation state management

• Reduced code duplication

• Better error handling and user feedback

• Improved data persistence

In this version, we bring you a new Bill of Materials view to export your project after you design it! You can export a parts list and now a screenshot of your diagrams. We are also excited to debut a new sign in flow for alpha.

New Features

• Bill of Materials: You can now export your entire parts list as a CSV or PDF. Each row includes Name, MPN/SKU/ASIN, Category, Supplier, In-Stock status, Quantity, Unit Price, and Total—complete with vendor links and live pricing when available.

• Screenshot Tool: One click captures your entire board. Perfect for documentation, sharing progress, or explaining how a design fits together—no more third-party screenshots.

• Sign in Improvements: We rebuilt the entire authentication system. Protoboard now runs alpha testing in batches, each with a unique activation code to access the latest features. The new flow is simple: email → code → enter (or sign up).

• “Add first Part” UI Update: A friendly new button appears when your board is empty, guiding you straight to the Part Bin to add your first component and start building faster.

Bug Fixes

• Some of the UI colors have been fixed to align with our theming properly

Next Steps

We see a gap in our ability to represent all parts that can exist, so we are making some updates that will allow our users to add custom parts more easily and manually represent their system without needing to rely on our smart Protopart definitions, which are limited to <60 parts. We hope that soon every system diagram will be representable in Protoboard, even if we do not have the parts in the library with full support for you to manually configure connections, pins, BOM info, etc.

• BUGFIX: Improved function-linking panel in Part Inspector: Resource allocation to interface functions now populate properly.

In this version, harnesses now have useful labels and only carry a single interface for simplicity. The Harness Inspector has been overhauled with a much better flow for connecting the parts on your board. Finally, a project planning view has been added to the left sidebar.

New Features:

• Simplified Harnesses: In previous versions of the app, each line could represent essentially everything about a connection between 2 devices (power, data, mounting, anything)! We have simplified these lines, called “harnesses” to be limited to a single purpose. This purpose can still contain multiple wires (think power being positive and negative) but all the wires are contributing to the same “interface” between parts.

  

• Labeled Harness: Now that harnesses contain only one function, they also have been given a visual update. There is a simple text label on each line in the diagram, greatly enhancing the readability of your diagrams.

• Individual Function Pairing: As stated above, harnesses can carry multiple functioned wires that contribute to the same interface. There is now a visual update which allows you to choose which wires/functions within that harness can be linked together.

  

• Board Plan Tab: We are focusing Protoboard’s features toward a multi-step process that takes your idea from plan to design to ordered prototype. The left menu is being developed to support this experience, starting with the Plan tab. Here, you can name, describe, and add requirements that need to be fulfilled for your project to work. In the future, you can work with team members our AI assistant (in development) to create a solid plan and verify that your project meets your design goals.

  

• UI Improvements: We completed some general UI improvements, including light mode and menu visual changes.

Future Features in Development:

• Bill of Materials: As a part of the prototyping workflow, we want to offer you the ability to export your parts list with calculated prices and links for purchase.

• Image Export: A simple tool for creating a screenshot of your diagram to use in other programs or share with others.

• Harness Visual Improvements: We are working on an even more robust visualization of connections between parts, including visualizing every wire but still retaining the “single connection” experience.

• Custom Part Geometry: Instead of simply having the option of rectangles for every part, we are working on a way for custom SVG shapes to be used for parts. These will be definable in part definitions and changeable in the app.

• App UI Overhaul: Our app visuals and theme are getting an upgrade. Kevin’s been cooking up some new UI, and we are working on getting that implemented for v3.

• DRC: We’re improving Protoboard’s ability to show you where and why your parts are incompatible, and recommendations on how to improve your design. We are building a “Design Rule Checker” and overhauling the ProtoPart definition system, with the hope of rebuilding it based on Atopile, a hardware description language.

• Fixed a bug where the “Add Blank Part” button fails to do anything. It now correctly adds a blank part to the canvas that works just as one from the library does.

This release brings colored part connections (green, red, and yellow) showing validation state, advanced part search with sorting and pagination, smarter save awareness, and a round of quality-of-life fixes.

New Features

• Faster, Consistent Pagination: Smooth, paging for the ProtoPart Library (left side panel) giving you fast part fetching from our database.

• Save Awareness (Dirty-State Tracking): The app now detects unsaved changes and surfaces clear save indicators to prevent data loss.

• DRC Visual Clarity: Harness edges use clear colors (red, yellow, green) to reflect design rule status, giving instant feedback while wiring.

Bug Fixes

• Reliable Board Saves: Fixed issues that could prevent board state from saving correctly in some cases.

• Search Stability: Improved resilience when indexes are unavailable; searches degrade gracefully instead of failing.

• Pagination for Signed-In Users: Resolved incorrect or inconsistent page results when authenticated.

• Smoother Browsing: Reduced flicker and intermittent errors when loading part lists via better caching.

• Startup Reliability: Fixed analytics initialization on unsupported browsers to avoid startup errors.

We recently migrated from Vite to a fullstack Next.JS project. This was a big move, but has already resulted in accelerated development! We have also added 2 developers to our team and hope to move through our roadmap quickly.

Next Features to Expect:

• More Verbose Part Connections - Visualize every wire and configure your design purely on the canvas (no need to use our current inspector which is more suitable for advanced users)

• An easier starting process - Protoboard will guide users in a more friendly way to build their project from 0 to prototype.

• Bill of Materials - Export your parts list with links on where to purchase each part.

• Our Parts Library is Moving to GitHub! Soon, you will be able to view the source code for every part in our library and add your own to our open-source repository: ProtoPart/protoparts at main · Delta-Robotics-Inc/ProtoPart