A boardview viewer the agent drives with you.

The boardview format problem

Every manufacturer and every factory tool has its own format: .fz files on the Quanta and ASRock side, the historical .brd and its variants, GenCAD .cad for ASUS mainboards, the .bdv, .asc, .tvw files coming out of production-line test tools. Thirteen incompatible formats circulate in the repair world, and documentation for the same board rarely arrives twice in the same shape.

Every shop knows the result: a collection of small utilities, each opening one or two formats, none talking to the others, and the PDF schematic open in a separate window with no link whatsoever to the board view.

WrenchBoard attacks the problem at the root: one viewer, all thirteen parsed natively (.kicad_pcb, .pcb, .brd in BRD2 and Test_Link variants, .cad, .fz, .bdv, .asc, .tvw, .bv, .bvr, .gr, .cst, .f2b). Bring the file, the tool reads it.

Two formats go further than the rest. .kicad_pcb is native source, so values and footprints come through exact. And the XZZ-encrypted .pcb carries the factory’s own test expectations, the resistance and voltage each net is supposed to read, which the agent compares against your live measurements.

Open your format in the browser

No converter, no desktop install: drop the file and the tool reads it natively, components and nets included. What each format is, and where it comes from.

• Open a .brd file online: the historical OpenBoardView format, BRD2 and Test_Link variants, with refdes search and top/bottom flip.
• Open a .fz file: PCB Repair Tool boards, common on Quanta and ASRock, read with no prior conversion.
• Open a .tvw file: Tebo IctView, straight off the production-line tester.
• Open a .pcb file: the XZZ-encrypted format, which also carries the factory’s expected resistance and voltage per net.
• .cad: GenCAD 1.4, used for ASUS mainboards.
• .bdv and .asc: the HONHAN BoardViewer and ASUS TSICT test exports.
• .bv, .bvr, .gr, .cst, .f2b: the ATE, binary BoardViewer, BoardView R5.0, Card Analysis ST and Unisoft ProntoPLACE formats, all read the same way.

Open your board in the browser: free, no account, nothing stored.

What the canvas can do

The boardview renders in an interactive canvas designed for the repair bench:

• Refdes search: type R49 and the view goes there, whichever side it’s on.
• Net highlighting: every pin of a power net lit up at once, to follow a rail across the board.
• Top/bottom flip: automatic side switch when the component you’re after is on the other face.
• Type filtering: show only the fuses, only the connectors, only the capacitors.
• Annotations and arrows: mark a probe point, trace a signal path between two components.
• Physical distance: measure the gap between two centers in millimetres, useful before running a jumper.
• Touch-driven: pinch-zoom, pan and tap-select on phone and tablet, not desktop only.

The WrenchBoard difference: an agent-driven boardview

Everything above exists, scattered across other viewers. What exists nowhere else: the canvas is exposed to a diagnostic agent as a toolset. Seventeen commands, highlight, zoom, dim the irrelevant, point at a pin, propose a step-by-step measurement protocol, that the agent calls while it reasons.

Concretely: you report “board dead, no LED”. The agent crosses the device’s failure rules, identifies the input fuse as the prime suspect, and at that same moment the boardview zooms onto F1, highlights it and shows step 1 of the protocol: continuity across the fuse. You measure, you report the reading, the view moves to the next point.

The boardview viewer stops being a document you consult and becomes the diagnostic’s working screen. It’s the core of the approach described on the microsoldering software page.

Boardview + schematic: the electrical graph

A boardview gives you component positions and nets; it doesn’t tell you each net’s role. WrenchBoard closes that gap with schematic ingestion: a PDF goes page by page through a vision model and comes out as a compiled electrical graph: power rails classified, boot sequence inferred, connections queryable.

With both sources loaded, the agent reasons on the schematic and acts on the boardview: it knows that PP3V3_S5 feeds a given controller and where to put the probe to verify it. That junction is what makes end-to-end guided motherboard diagnostics possible.

Try it with your own file

The viewer is live and free: open your own boardview in the browser, no account needed, nothing stored. When you want more than viewing, the free plan opens the full bench on devices covered by the knowledge base, and the Pro plan adds durable ingestion of your own boardviews and schematics into a device pack the diagnostic agent reasons on. The full engine is source-available on GitHub for shops that prefer self-hosting.