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

Nice scope!
I had a similar experience with using Claude to automate circuit design/simulation/optimization and found that they are not good at it.
They are surprisingly good at taking raw files and describing what is in them, but they fall apart when trying to do anything other than design the simplest circuit. I think it is because they have no concept of the physics behind a circuit, so they cannot make changes that a designer would make. For optimizing a circuit using, say, an EM simulator, they don't know what to tweak and how to tweak it. In the end, I had to write a script to talk to the simulator and create a config file that specified the bounds of the simulation: step size, optimization algorithm, min, max, etc. Only then could I use an agent to call the script to optimize the circuit.

This is an interesting use case with Claude. It sounds like you took away some tedious work with the checking of waveforms, and you are able to speed up your design loop because of it.

this kind of thing is super cool to close the loop.waiting for FPAA to get better so we can vibecode analog circuitshttps://www.eetimes.com/podcasts/making-analog-chip-designs-...

> SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) is a general-purpose, open-source analog electronic circuit simulator. [1]1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE

Really nice. My mother is an applied Physics teacher, and she told me they had a hard time at work figuring out how they could connect their teaching material to LLM in a relevant way. This should be useful to her.

Measure with a micrometer, mark with a pencil, cut with an axe.

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

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

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.

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