Connect an AI assistant to your PCB designs

Published September 22, 2026

An assistant that only has the zip you pasted into a chat is reading text it cannot parse well. A KiCad schematic is thousands of lines of coordinates and identifiers, and an Altium document is binary. Ask it what connects to U3 and it guesses.

BoardRepo gives it the design instead. It runs a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server at https://boardrepo.com/mcp, and an assistant connected to it reads the same parsed schematic, copper, BOM and check results that a board page renders.

What an assistant can read

Once connected, an assistant can:

• search public boards by free text, or narrow by component, tag, license, author or capability, for example component:rp2040 has:pcb
• open a board's overview and list its files
• read the schematic as components, pins and nets rather than coordinates, focused on one reference designator or one net
• read the PCB copper: layers, vias, pads, and each net's routed length
• pull the BOM with reference designators, values, footprints and manufacturer part numbers
• read the stored DRC and ERC results, or run the checks against the board's own rules or a fab profile such as JLCPCB, PCBWay or OSH Park
• read a source file, or search across a board's text files for a net name or part number

Specific questions work best. "Which public boards use an ESP32-S3 with USB-C power?", "What is on the 3V3 net of this board?", "Which parts on this board have no manufacturer part number?" and "Does this layout pass JLCPCB's 2-layer limits?" each map onto one or two of those reads.

Which boards it can see

The consent screen asks you to choose: public boards only, or public boards plus the boards you own, including private ones. A connection has exactly the permissions shown on that screen. A reading connection can search, read project data and request checks, but it cannot edit source files, rename a board, change its visibility, publish or delete anything. If a save permission is offered and you approve it, the assistant can also create boards and add versions to boards you own, and nothing else.

You can revoke a connection at any time in Settings.

Connecting

There is no API key to create. Open Connect AI and pick your assistant:

• Claude: BoardRepo is listed in Claude's connector directory. Connect once and it works in Claude on the web, in the desktop app and on mobile.
• Cursor and VS Code: one click adds the server, then you approve the sign-in.
• Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and Gemini CLI: one command each.
• ChatGPT: add BoardRepo as a connector in developer mode, which needs a paid plan.
• Any other client that supports Streamable HTTP and OAuth dynamic client registration can connect with the URL alone.

In every case the assistant opens a BoardRepo sign-in in your browser and you approve access there. Never type your BoardRepo password into an assistant.

What to keep in mind

An answer is the assistant's reading of the data, not a sign-off. Connectivity comes from the design files, so it is only as right as the schematic, and a very large design may be truncated; the response says so when it is. The first time an assistant asks for a board's nets or copper, BoardRepo may still be computing them, and the assistant is told to try again shortly rather than guess.

Checks cover geometry and connectivity within each file, not whether the circuit does what you meant. Check a board before you order it covers what they miss.

For the developer view of the same server, including its discovery documents and the Markdown version of every public board page, see the developer and agent docs.