remote-workstation-mcp
Owner-gated MCP remote workstation agent letting AI clients operate files, dev tools and authorized hosts, including a KiCad PCB workstation.
What it does and how it connects
Remote Workstation MCP securely connects ChatGPT to Windows and Linux engineering workstations. Each machine runs as an independent Direct Node with its own outbound OpenAI Secure MCP Tunnel, no SSH hub is required, and the local owner decides what ChatGPT may read, modify or execute, while the workstation MCP stays bound to loopback instead of being exposed directly to the internet.
The project has grown from a secure remote-control bridge into an engineering control plane: deterministic typed tools first, isolated work sessions second, optional AI workers behind the same safety boundaries, and higher-level automation layered on top without bypassing policy, audit or hardware interlocks. Windows is the only actively developed and newly released target; Ubuntu and Linux are legacy and frozen.
For PCB work, the repo documents a Windows engineering workflow acceptance with a read-only KiCad electrical and design acceptance workflow, source SHA-256, and explicit manufacturing holds, plus Work Session safety rules and Codex, Antigravity and NotebookLM handoff rules. Domain workloads such as STM32, ESP32 and ROS 2 are extensions on top of the generic workstation platform.
Alternatives
Compare side by side- kicad-mcp (blwfish)
A community MCP server letting agents drive KiCad PCB workflows, rather than a generic remote workstation agent with a KiCad acceptance workflow.
- bambu-printer-mcp
An MCP server for Bambu Lab printers with slicing and direct printer control, rather than a general remote workstation agent.
- kicad-mcp-pro
An MCP server exposing KiCad schematic, PCB, ERC/DRC, DFM, BOM and manufacturing export workflows, rather than a generic remote workstation agent.
- agentic-hil
Policy-gated MCP tools that flash firmware onto a real board and use the hardware run as the acceptance test, rather than a remote workstation agent.
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
- 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.
- No independent user voice found: no public non-PR issues were returned.
- The README text names v0.70.0-dev.10 as the development head and v0.68.0 as stable, while the latest release tag is v0.71.1; the release tag is used for repo stats.
Last verified November 6, 2026. Listings are informational. The evidence score measures public, verifiable evidence and is not an endorsement or a compatibility claim.