skill

KiCad Board Audit

Public Made by Adom

by adom

Agent skill for auditing any KiCad board before fab: real ERC/DRC, pad-level netlist extraction from the .kicad_pcb, and a checklist for the bugs ERC can't see — floating mandatory pins, supply pins on GND, wrong straps, wrong-variant feedback dividers, missing pull-ups, impedance class misassignment — verified against datasheets and reported by severity.

skillkicadpcbdesign-reviewercdrchardware
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KiCad Board Audit

An agent skill that turns "review this board for errors" into a repeatable, verified audit of any KiCad project, schematic and layout, before you spend money on fabrication.

What it does

  1. Runs the real checkers: kicad-cli ERC + DRC (locally or through the Adom desktop KiCad bridge), and reads the project's silenced-rule config so a "clean" pass can't hide muted checks.
  2. Extracts the pad-level netlist from the .kicad_pcb (the synced ground truth) with the bundled assets/kicad_netlist.py: components, per-net pin lists, unconnected pads, routed lengths, via counts. Handles KiCad 7–10 format differences.
  3. Walks an electrical checklist for the bugs ERC is structurally blind to: floating mandatory pins (VCAP-type), supply pins tied to GND, strap/boot-pin encodings, regulator dividers computed with the wrong variant's VFB, missing open-drain pull-ups, crystal load-cap math, connector shields, reset timing.
  4. Audits the layout from the file: net-class impedance assignment (and nets that silently fall into Default), diff-pair skew, via-vs-constraint conflicts, keepout allow-flags, stale zones, unrouted items.
  5. Verifies every suspicion against a primary source (datasheet, vendor hardware-design checklist, EVB schematic) before reporting it, then delivers a severity-ranked report (Critical / High / Medium / Low), each finding with refs, pins, evidence, and a concrete fix, plus a verified-correct section so good design doesn't get re-flagged next review.

Born from a real audit of a 7-port automotive Ethernet switch board where ERC reported 0/0 while the MCU's VCAP pins floated and four switch supply pins sat on GND. The checklist is generic: it applies to any board with ICs on it.

Install

adom-wiki pkg install adom/kicad-board-audit

The install links the skill into ~/.claude/skills/ so any agent session can invoke it. Then just ask: "audit this board: path/to/project.kicad_pro".