pcb-inspector
Automated three-layer design review and linter for KiCad: DRC/ERC plus spatial heuristics.
What it does and how it connects
pcb-inspector is an automated multi-layer design review and linter for KiCad projects, built to catch placement flaws, decoupling issues, routing problems and mixed-signal design risks before a board goes to fabrication. It runs standalone as a CLI or GitHub Action, or integrates with agentic PCB workflows such as Konnect to form a closed loop of design, audit, fix and verify.
The verification pipeline has three layers: deterministic ground truth from KiCad itself, with ERC and DRC run through kicad-cli; programmatic engineering heuristics for decoupling, loop areas and return paths; and multimodal visual review by a vision model on 2D and 3D renders. Findings are aggregated and prioritized with severity, coordinates, net names, evidence and fix instructions, in an interactive HTML report.
The tool also ships a built-in MCP server for AI agents, a continuous watch mode that re-checks on board save, and dedicated commands for fast DRC and ERC only, heuristics only, and vision review only. Layer 1 and hosted vision renders need KiCad 8 or later with kicad-cli on PATH; without it, Layer 1 is reported as not run rather than silently skipped. The README badges support for KiCad 8, 9 and 10, and Python 3.10 or later.
Alternatives
Compare side by side- kicad-happy
Human-written agent skills for KiCad review covering schematic, layout review, BOM, export and Gerber review, rather than a three-layer automated reviewer and linter.
- image2KiCAD
An experimental script that converts reference images into KiCad schematics, rather than a three-layer reviewer and linter for finished boards.
- Mechanical-AI-Skill
An AI review skill for mechanical engineering that reviews STEP assemblies, rather than a three-layer reviewer and linter for KiCad boards.
Recurring errors it addresses
Error Index entries this tool is built to reduce or work around.
- 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
- 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
- KiCad 10.0.0 to 10.0.6 wrote every ERC JSON position 100x too small, so a review tool compensating by 100 would place every marker 100x too far out on KiCad 10.0.7.Error Index
- KiCAD-MCP-Server's export_gerber returns success: true and lists all 24 layers as exported, but writes no .gbr files: PlotLayer draws into a plot file that was never opened with OpenPlotfile, returns False unchecked, and only the drill files (from a separate kicad-cli call) land in the folder. An agent reading the response would report the fab package ready when the folder is empty.Error Index
Sources
Not verified
- Pricing: none stated on the repo.
- Real user voices: no real linked post read for this page.
- A named individual builder beyond the repository owner handle takzen
Last verified November 6, 2026. Listings are informational. The evidence score measures public, verifiable evidence and is not an endorsement or a compatibility claim.