altium-mcp (coffeenmusic) errors

13 recurring problems engineers report in altium-mcp (coffeenmusic), ranked by impact.

#31 by errors trackedECAD

Recurring altium-mcp (coffeenmusic) errors, by impact

  1. 1Adds run_drc so an agent can check its own board edits in Altium. Altium batch DRC call fails for every argument list tried, the scripted DRC opens a modal dialog that waits for a person to press Run, and a cancelled check looks clean. The workaround presses the button from outside Altium with posted mouse messages, confirms the press by the dialog closing, and cross-checks against the .drc report. Commands also now take an explicit board_path instead of acting on whichever board has focus.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  2. 2After in-place sheet edits by the agent tools, the check was a compile followed by a hand-written dump of the netlist, compared by eye. Yet that check is the safety net for in-place edits: a label dropped one grid off a wire end silently splits a net. The PR adds a before/after netlist diff with snapshots.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  3. 3On a real sheet, a port had auto-sized to a shorter name, so its end no longer touched the wire meeting it. The wire ended inside the port's body, connected to nothing, and compiling did not flag it. The existing checker only checked drafting, and its fixes had to be turned into edit operations by hand.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report74
  4. 4A wire a few microns off the pin looks right and connects to nothing. Ports auto-size to their names, so a rename moves the pin end off the wire, and compile did not flag one such case on a real sheet. The PR lets agents wire to 'U20.VCC' by reference and adds a fixed port width.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  5. 5Adding parts to an Altium DbLib meant editing its Excel table by hand or script. A stale lock file looked like a real lock, and a script that wrote values as text into a column of numbers left cells that Altium reads as empty, with no warning.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  6. 6Editing the .PrjPcb by hand did not work while the project was open because Altium keeps its own copy of the options and writes it back on save. Changing a cross-reference option meant editing the file, closing the project and reopening it, and nothing showed which sheets generate rooms.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  7. 7Symbols an agent creates in an Altium SchLib never mark the library as modified, so closing Altium throws them away without asking.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  8. 8The agent tool could only place parts from a .SchLib, so placing a DbLib part meant placing the symbol, copying it and patching the DbLib link fields by hand-written script, because Altium's own LoadComponentFromDatabaseLibrary returned nil for every form tried on AD25. Percent cells come back as '0,5%' on a decimal-comma machine.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  9. 9The Altium MCP sandbox script failed between PreProcess and PostProcess, breaking Altium undo history until restart, and the agent could not read error dialogs drawn as non-windowed labels.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  10. 10The contributor built a read-only check of the whole project's sheet hierarchy from saved files with no running Altium needed. Design Synchronize Sheet Entries and Ports works one sheet symbol at a time by exact name, the fatal ERC 'Missing harness type on harness' gives no location, and files can carry a stale IOTYPE on harness entries. Checked against ERC on a 30-sheet project, it found every unlinked entry and port plus both fatals.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  11. 11The tools could predict Update PCB but someone had to press Validate, read the check column and press Execute. Running the real ECO showed the prediction got two things wrong. The PR drives the dialog through Windows UI Automation.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  12. 12tools that succeeded report failure (a moved part reports failure on decimal-comma locales; a net class that gained nets reports nets_added: 0), so an agent may retry a completed action or tell the user it failed.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report66
  13. 13with a schematic or library focused, every PCB tool quietly runs on the first .PcbDoc (often a panel drawing with no parts), returning empty/wrong data, and misreports "no designators given" when designators were given but not found.ECAD · Agent failure · 1 report66

How it fails

  1. Agent failure13

Engineering tools that address these errors

Sourced from public community reports. Costs and delays on individual entries are modeled estimates, not measurements.