wtf is pinscope?

Pinscope reviews electronic circuit schematics the way an experienced hardware engineer would, by actually reading the datasheets for every part on the board instead of only checking general wiring rules. You give it a netlist and a bill of materials describing your design, along with the datasheet PDFs for the chips involved, and it builds a graph of how every component and wire connects to every other one. The tool exists because standard electrical rule checks in circuit design software can pass a board that still does not work. A checker has no way of knowing that a specific chip drives its output at a voltage too high for the microcontroller pin it connects to, or that a signal has been wired to a pin whose datasheet only allows a different function, or that leaving a certain pin unconnected will quietly add a large amount of electrical noise. None of that breaks a formal wiring rule, but it is written in the part's datasheet, and nobody has time to reread hundreds of pages of documentation for every part on every design revision. Pinscope works in four steps. First it parses the bill of materials and netlist, which can come from tools like KiCad, Altium, OrCAD, or EasyEDA, into a graph of components and connections. Second, it pulls the relevant pin tables and specifications out of each datasheet PDF, caching the result so a given part is only processed once. Third, it reviews each chip individually, looking at its datasheet alongside the surrounding circuit and filing findings with a severity level, its reasoning, and the exact datasheet page that supports it. Fourth, it computes things that do not need judgment at all, like a full parts list summary and a capacitor voltage derating table, directly from the graph with no AI model involved. A final pass can merge duplicate findings or lower their severity, but never raise it. Running it locally requires Python 3.12 or newer, Node 20 or newer, and an Anthropic API key, since the per-chip review step uses Claude. A hosted version with team accounts is available at pinscope.ai. The project itself is released under AGPL-3.0, with separate commercial licensing available by contacting the developer.