Show HN: An LLM-Powered Tool to Catch PCB Schematic Mistakes

Somewhat related: a while ago I was working on a project and wanted to use an RS485 to TTL conversion board which came with badly translated instructions. However, somebody had reverse engineered the design and uploaded an EasyEDA schematic. I shoved the raw JSON for the schematic (which looked quite cryptic to me) into Gemini 2.5 Pro and asked it if it could understand it, and it cheerfully responded with:

> Of course, Jack. I can understand the schematic from the provided JSON file. It describes an RS485 to TTL Converter Module. > Here is a detailed breakdown of the circuit's design and functionality

...followed by an absolutely reasonable description of the whole board. It was imprecise, but with some guidance (and by putting together my basic skills with Gemini's vast but unreliable knowledge) I was able to figure out a few things I needed to know about the board. Quite impressive.

In general, there are always "better" solutions to any problem, but finding the right balance for your budget is the key.

If doing industrial work, than consumer-grade workmanship / LLM-slop is usually unacceptable. Start with the FTDI firmware tool and an isolation chip App-note...

https://www.analog.com/en/products/adm2895e-1.html

Best of luck =3

I had a really similar experience, which is a big reason why I built this. Uploading my own schematics to the usual web LLMs gave a mix of useful notes and some pretty big misunderstandings. I really believe this tool is set up to deliver better results than the general-purpose GPT/Gemini/Claude interfaces for this kind of task. Hoping others try it and have a much better experience too!

Also good call on processing EasyEDA schematics. I hadn’t considered that initially, but I’m definitely going to add support for it.

Oh absolutely -- this was a no-stakes personal project, so I was happy to rely on pre-made solutions and learn a thing or two along the way.