Konnect *BETA Release

AI-assisted PCB design for KiCAD 10. Konnect is a native KiCAD plugin — a single Rust binary — that lets Claude and other AI assistants design schematics and PCBs through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

228 tools across 21 on-demand toolsets. Schematic capture, PCB layout and routing, ERC/DRC, design-review audits, JLCPCB part search, reference circuits, and a full manufacturing export pipeline — with bundled skills and agents that teach Claude KiCAD conventions out of the box.

Status: beta. The core toolchain is tested and working, but this is a young release and it wants real-world mileage and review. Issues and PRs are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md and the naming conventions.

Add realtime research to KiCAD MCP and Konnect. Introducing Nimrod

Nimrod is our web-research MCP server: quality-scored Google search, clean webpage extraction, and deep multi-source research. Design the board with Konnect while Nimrod pulls live parts availability, datasheets, and errata — no more guessing from year-old training data

• Works with claude.ai, Claude Desktop, Claude Code, VS Code, and any MCP client
• 1 credit = 1 search · extraction always free · free 50-credit trial, no card
• Official MCP Registry: ai.orchis/nimrod

Why Konnect exists

Konnect is the successor to KiCAD-MCP-Server, a Python/TypeScript project that proved AI-driven PCB design works — and, in the process, showed exactly where that architecture runs out of road. Konnect was built to fix those specific problems:

The call path was too long. In the original server, a single tool call travels through TypeScript, schema validation, a spawned Python subprocess, JSON over stdin/stdout, a command router, and finally SWIG-generated C++ proxy objects before anything touches your board. That's four language and serialization boundaries, each with its own failure modes — subprocess lifecycle management, stdout parsing that filters out warnings KiCAD leaks into the stream, chunked-JSON reassembly. In Konnect, a tool call is a function call. One process, one language, no plumbing.

The dependency surface was enormous. Running the original means carrying Node.js and its npm tree, Python and its pip packages, wxPython, kicad-skip, and KiCAD's SWIG bindings — two package ecosystems plus a binding layer, every one of them a moving target that can break an install. Konnect is a single static binary — 20–25 MB depending on platform, a ~9 MB download. There is nothing to install alongside it and nothing to version-match.

SWIG is a dead end. The original's PCB backend depends on KiCAD's SWIG Python bindings, which KiCAD is deprecating in favor of its IPC API. SWIG also carried real operational scars: a zone-fill call that can segfault the backend, proxy-object comparison bugs, and a fallback path that can silently swap backends mid-session. Konnect talks to KiCAD 10 through the official IPC API (protobuf over NNG) — the interface KiCAD is investing in — with real-time board edits that integrate with KiCAD's own undo/redo.

Schematic edits should not corrupt files. Konnect edits .kicad_sch files through its own S-expression engine with atomic writes (write, fsync, rename), UUID preservation, and round-trip tests — no third-party schematic library with known gaps, no text-manipulation workarounds.

Context economy is a feature. Exposing all 228 tools to an LLM costs roughly 23K tokens of context on every listing. Konnect's router loads a starter kit (~2K tokens) and lets the model pull in toolsets on demand — plus built-in observability (get_recent_calls, server_stats, JSONL call logs) so the model can diagnose its own tool failures.

The result is smaller, faster to install, aligned with where KiCAD is going, and built for production use rather than experimentation. The original project remains open, maintained, and useful — see the comparison below.

What it does

Instead of describing changes and applying them by hand, the AI works your project directly:

• Place and wire schematic components — add resistors, ICs, connectors; wire them together by pin name
• Lay out the PCB — place, move, rotate, and route footprints in real time via KiCAD's IPC API, with full undo/redo integration
• Run design checks — ERC, DRC, connectivity validation, decoupling audits, power-rail review, BOM health checks
• Export production files — Gerbers, drill, BOM, pick-and-place, 3D models, PDF
• Search JLCPCB parts — find in-stock components in a local 2.5M-part catalog and suggest alternatives
• Start from reference circuits — USB-C, LDO, buck converter, STM32, I2C, LED templates with verified component values
• Watch it happen — a live schematic viewer auto-refreshes as the AI edits

The full tool catalog is documented in tool-directory.md.

How it works

Layer	Mechanism
Schematic editing	Direct .kicad_sch S-expression editing with atomic writes (no KiCAD required)
PCB editing	KiCad 10 IPC API (NNG + protobuf) — real-time and undo-aware; single-footprint placement has a safe headless fallback
Specctra routing	Revision-bound Rust DSN export, local Freerouting MCP routing, and strict one-transaction SES import; an authenticated KiCad 10 native-export bridge is explicit opt-in
Exports & checks	kicad-cli subprocess (Gerber, PDF, ERC, DRC, …)
Transport	MCP JSON-RPC over stdio (default), or Streamable HTTP (transport = "http" / "both")

Explore the request path and safety boundaries in the interactive architecture diagrams. They are published from a standalone documentatio