logoalt Hacker News

Show HN: Spice simulation → oscilloscope → verification with Claude Code

44 pointsby _fizz_buzz_today at 12:37 AM9 commentsview on HN

I built MCP servers for my oscilloscope and SPICE simulator so Claude Code can close the loop between simulation and real hardware.


Comments

andrewklofastoday at 4:54 AM

Hit this exact wall six months back building Claude Code stuff for KiCad review[1]. First pass let Claude read .kicad_sch directly via grep/read. It happily invented pin numbers that didn't exist. Rewrote it with Python analyzers that spit out JSON, now Claude just reads the JSON, problem mostly went away.

Curious how spicelib-mcp handles models that aren't in the bundled library. Do you pass the .lib path as a tool arg, or does the server own a registry?

[1] https://github.com/aklofas/kicad-happy

show 1 reply
iterateoftentoday at 3:13 AM

Beware. I had Claude code with opus building boards and using spice simulations. It completely hallucinated the capabilities of the board and made some pretty crazy claims like I had just stumbled onto the secret hardware billion dollar project that every home needed.

None of the boards worked and I had to just do the project in codex. Opus seemed too busy congratulating itself to realize it produced gibberish.

show 1 reply
Scene_Cast2today at 3:42 AM

I've found that having LLMs work with mermaid diagrams makes describing and modifying circuits less annoying.

Archit3chtoday at 3:06 AM

Nice! Doing something similar with a Jumperless so that the model can reconfigure the circuit on the fly.

show 1 reply
vomayanktoday at 12:44 AM

Very cool idea closing the loop between simulation and real hardware.

Have you found the MCP-driven workflow reliable enough for repeated testing cycles, or does it still need manual verification at key steps?

show 1 reply