Windows desktop · one-time licence
FastBoardView opens the board files you already have — including the ones other viewers refuse — puts the schematic PDF next to the board with click-through cross-probing, and drops your Bluetooth multimeter readings straight onto the pads.
Windows 10/11 · no subscription · runs entirely on your machine
Format support
That is the first question every technician asks about a boardview, and most product pages dodge it. Here is the exact list. If your file is one of these, it opens — no converter, no extra step.
Standard ASCII BRD — Landrex, Allegro and FastBoard style exports.
Apple's byte-scrambled variant. Detected and decoded automatically; you just open it like any other file.
GenCAD and Fabmaster. The format most Dell, Compal, Quanta and Wistron boardviews ship in.
BVRAW format 3 — including files carrying a version-stamp prefix that makes naive parsers give up on the first line.
RC6-encrypted FZ files. Enter your key once and they behave like every other format from then on.
Plain JSON board data, for anything you have already converted or exported yourself.
To be exact about .fz: those files are genuinely
encrypted by whatever tool exported them. FastBoardView decrypts them
when you supply the key. It does not ship a key, guess one, or break
the cipher — and no software that claims otherwise is telling you the truth.
The viewer
Pads are polygons, not dots. A BGA is drawn as a BGA, a QFN as a QFN, and the part outline you see on screen is the footprint on the board — so what you are looking at through the microscope and what is on the canvas agree.
Selecting a pin lights the net across both sides of the board and lists every pad on it — designator, pin number, package, side — so you can jump between them without hunting. The part number, package and value sit in the same panel.
Dual view puts top and bottom next to each other, locked to the same selection. The part you picked on the top side is marked on the bottom too — useful the moment you are chasing something that crosses the board.
The workflow
A boardview on its own still leaves you with a PDF in one window, a meter in your hand and notes on paper. These are the parts that close that gap.
Open the schematic PDF in a pane next to the board. Click a part on the board and the schematic jumps to it; click a designator in the schematic and the board centres on it. Every text run in the PDF is indexed by position, so the link works on the drawing you already have — nothing to prepare.
Pick a rail and follow it through the parts that carry it — filters, fuses, series resistors, inductors — instead of stopping at the first net boundary. The result is a list of every net the rail becomes and the part that connects each hop, each one clickable back onto the board.
Measured 0.00 V on a rail? Pick it, and every part sitting across it to ground comes back as a suspect — chips and MOSFETs first, then capacitors, then protection diodes. Tick them off as you clear them, and jump to each one on the board from the list.
Connect a Bluetooth multimeter and the reading lands on whichever pad you have selected. Record as you probe and the board fills in with real values — no transcribing, no notebook. Optionally a USB foot pedal captures the reading, so both hands stay on the probes.
Record the readings from a board that works, then put the dead one beside it. What differs is what you look at first.
Paint the corroded area onto the board and it stays with the job — so the next person to pick it up knows where the water went.
Selections, readings, notes and damage marks are kept per board. Close the app, come back tomorrow, carry on.
Export what you measured as CSV — for the customer, for the ticket, or for the reference profile of the next board like it.
The archive
Most shops have a folder — or a network share — with hundreds of boardviews collected over years, named however whoever sent them felt like naming them. FastBoardView reads that pile once and turns it into something searchable.
By model (Latitude 5520), by board number (LA-9531P), or by brand. Filter down to laptop, desktop, GPU, Mac or phone.
A boardview and the PDF that belongs with it are treated as a pair and open together, instead of being two separate hunts.
The first pass over a large share takes a couple of minutes. After that the list is remembered and opens immediately.
Point it at a folder on the machine or a UNC path on the shop server. If the share is offline it falls back to where the last board came from.
AI & MCP
“Which parts sit across PP3V3_S5, and where do I probe first?”
FastBoardView ships an MCP server. Connect it to Claude Desktop and Claude can inspect the board that is open right now — search parts and nets, read your recorded measurements and the reference profile, look at the schematic, and highlight a part on your screen so you know where to put the probe.
There is also a panel inside the app, for asking without leaving the window.
Press Connect once. The app writes its own MCP entry into Claude Desktop's configuration.
Restart Claude Desktop. It launches the server, which finds the running app over loopback on your machine.
Ask about the board in Claude Desktop. It reads the live selection, nets, parts and measurements.
Claude can select a part for you — the board on your screen jumps to it.
What this costs: the Claude Desktop route runs on your own Claude subscription. The in-app panel needs your own Anthropic API key, kept on your machine — the page never sees it. FastBoardView does not bundle, resell or subsidise AI usage, and works fully without either.
Where your data goes
FastBoardView is a desktop application. It reads board files from your disk or your network share, keeps your measurements in a local store, and needs no account and no internet connection to do any of it. Nothing about a board is uploaded, indexed off your machine or sent anywhere — with exactly one exception, which you trigger yourself: when you ask the AI panel a question, the board context in that question goes to Anthropic's API, and the app shows you what it is about to send before it sends it.
Who this is for
Laptop and desktop motherboards, day in day out, with an archive that has been growing for years and a bench that never empties.
Dense cards where the schematic runs to sixty pages and the difference between two rails is the whole job.
Apple's own board files included — the scrambled ones open without a conversion step.
If you already know what diode mode tells you and what a boardview file is, nothing here needs explaining.
Pricing
FastBoardView for Windows
paid once — not per month, not per board
PLACEHOLDER checkout link, licence delivery, how many machines one licence covers, and the update policy still need filling in.
Questions
If they are .brd, .cad, .asc,
.bvr, .bdv, .fz or .json,
yes — including Apple's scrambled .brd and BVRAW files with a
version-stamp prefix. If you have a file that will not open, send it and it
gets looked at; that is how most of this list got here.
Send it to info@sektor5.rs.
.fz files without the key?
No. .fz files are RC6-encrypted by the tool that made them.
FastBoardView decrypts them when you supply the key — you enter it once and it
is remembered. No key is bundled and none is guessed.
No. Board files are read from your disk or your share and stay there. Measurements are stored locally. The only outbound traffic is the AI panel, and only when you ask it something — it shows you the context it is about to send first.
Not to use it. Opening boards, schematics, tracing, the meter, the archive and the reports all work offline. Only the AI features need a connection.
Only if you want the AI features. Everything else works without either. The Claude Desktop route uses your existing subscription; the in-app panel uses your own Anthropic API key, stored on your machine.
Bluetooth meters that broadcast their readings. The app includes a learn step for pairing and for the optional USB capture pedal. PLACEHOLDER list the exact tested models here — this is the kind of specific answer that sells to this audience.
No. Windows 10 and 11 only. That is not on the roadmap today.
PLACEHOLDER decide whether there is a time-limited or feature-limited trial, and say so plainly here.
PLACEHOLDER state exactly what the one-time payment covers: which version, whether updates are included and for how long, and how many machines one licence activates.
One window, one price, and it runs on your bench PC without asking anyone's permission.