mcp-kicad (thalisantunes)
MCP server for KiCad 10 board readiness: staged ERC, DRC, JLCPCB-profile DRC, Gerber and drill checks, with BOM and CPL export and rotation correction.
Summary rewritten from the vendor site because the catalog version did not match it.
What it does and how it connects
mcp-kicad is an MCP server for KiCad 10 with JLCPCB manufacturing rules built in. It has 17 tools, the 17th being validate, and it runs on two transport layers by design: kicad-cli as the primary headless path, and the IPC API as a secondary path that needs the PCB Editor open. It uses no pcbnew SWIG bindings, which the README notes are removed in KiCad 11.
The file tools cover DRC and ERC, JLCPCB profiles, and BOM and CPL export with rotation correction, and they were verified against KiCad 10.0.5 in integration tests. The validate tool runs staged checks: schematic ERC, board DRC with the project design rules, fabrication rules with a JLCPCB profile applied to a copy, and Gerber and drill export with layer and drilling checks.
The IPC layer currently exposes only board_summary and has not yet been exercised against a live KiCad session, and the README says the IPC path can inspect and mutate the live session, so the server is not read-only. The package is distributed on PyPI as mcp-kicad10, since the mcp-kicad name there belongs to a different project.
Alternatives
Compare side by side- kicad-mcp-pro
An MCP server exposing KiCad schematic, PCB, ERC/DRC, DFM, BOM and manufacturing export workflows through gated profiles, rather than a 17-tool board-readiness server.
- kicad-mcp (blwfish)
A community MCP server letting AI agents drive KiCad PCB workflows such as autorouting and LCSC part lookup, rather than a board-readiness checker with staged validation.
- mcp-kicad-sch-api
An MCP server built on the kicad-sch-api Python library for programmatic creation and manipulation of KiCad schematic files, rather than a board-readiness server.
- kicad-claude-mcp
An MCP server giving AI clients direct tools to edit KiCad schematics and PCBs and run autorouting and ERC/DRC, rather than a readiness checker.
- offgrid-hardhub
A description-to-board agent loop in real KiCad with about 90 board tests, rather than a 17-tool readiness server for existing boards.
Recurring errors it addresses
Error Index entries this tool is built to reduce or work around.
- For symbols placed at rotation 90 or 270, sch_get_pin_positions reports each pin where KiCad puts the opposite pin. An engineer wired an LED's anode to a resistor at the reported position, and KiCad's netlist then had the cathode on the resistor and the anode on GND. The connectivity graph uses the same math, so it confirmed the wrong answer instead of flagging it.Error Index
- The add_label tool writes a label wherever it is told with no check. A label on the interior of another net's wire, or on a crossing, joins that net to the label's name, and the tool reports plain success. A pressure test used it to recover from a routing refusal and it wrote wrong in 41 of 67 names, sheet_pin and bus cases.Error Index
- The create_sym_lib_table tool builds library-table rows with a raw f-string and reports success while writing files KiCad rejects. A name with a double quote loses that row and every row after it, and a URI with backslashes is written raw so KiCad 9's lexer decodes the separators as escapes and the library is not found.Error Index
- A KiCad MCP bridge normalizes DRC, connectivity, and geometry into its own output format, and that normalized output can silently disagree with the native KiCad engine. The maintainer had to build seeded false-PASS and false-FAIL tests because the bridge layer cannot be trusted as engineering truth on its own.Error Index
- An engineer running Claude Code against KiCad found the agent kept repeating a stale claim of 19 DRC violations that lived on in prose docs. MCP tool summaries cannot be treated as live numbers; only DRC message text and actual exports are authoritative.Error Index
Sources
Not verified
- Pricing (no price stated on the repository README)
- Real user voices (recent repo activity is the maintainer's own pull requests)
- A named individual builder beyond the repository owner handle thalisantunes
- A standalone vendor website (no homepage is set on the repository)
Last verified November 6, 2026. Listings are informational. The evidence score measures public, verifiable evidence and is not an endorsement or a compatibility claim.