Blog

Thoughts on AI-assisted hardware design, KiCad automation, and electronics workflows.

Part 4: The Designer Agent — Circuit Calculations With a Paper Trail

Part 4 of the Pi Extensions for Hardware Design series. How I use the designer agent to run circuit calculations, cross-reference datasheets, and write design documents with traceable references.

Part 3: The Lib Agent — Cleaning Up KiCad Libraries

Part 3 of the Pi Extensions for Hardware Design series. How I use the lib agent to process downloaded KiCad libraries: renaming, stripping metadata, quality checking, and organizing symbols, footprints, and 3D models.

Part 2: The Doc Agent — Turning PDFs into Markdown the AI Can Read

Part 2 of the Pi Extensions for Hardware Design series. How I use the doc agent to convert datasheets into structured Markdown so the designer agent can read them.

Part 1: CircuitPilot — A Multi-Agent System for Hardware Design

Part 1 of the Pi Extensions for Hardware Design series. An overview of CircuitPilot: how it's structured, and the staged workflow that keeps projects coherent.

Getting AI to Read Datasheets — A PDF-to-Markdown Pipeline for Engineering Documents

Why OCR is the wrong approach for feeding PDF datasheets and user manuals into AI coding agents, and how a PyMuPDF-based extraction pipeline delivers clean, structured Markdown output instead.

Bringing Orcad CIS / CIP to KiCad — Database-Driven Component Management

How to leverage KiCad 9.0's SQLite database library feature to create an Orcad-style component information system with automated Digikey integration.