mixelpixx / Konnect

# Konnect *BETA Release
**AI-assisted PCB design for KiCAD 10.** Konnect is a native KiCAD plugin — a single
Rust binary — that lets Claude and other AI assistants design schematics and PCBs
through the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
**228 tools across 21 on-demand toolsets.** Schematic capture, PCB layout and
routing, ERC/DRC, design-review audits, JLCPCB part search, reference
circuits, and a full manufacturing export pipeline — with bundled skills and agents
that teach Claude KiCAD conventions out of the box.
> **Status: beta.** The core toolchain is tested and working, but this is a young
> release and it wants real-world mileage and review. Issues and PRs are welcome —
> see CONTRIBUTING.md and the
> naming conventions.
> ## Add realtime research to KiCAD MCP and Konnect. Introducing Nimrod
>
> **Nimrod** is our web-research MCP server:
> quality-scored Google search, clean webpage extraction, and deep multi-source
> research. Design the board with Konnect while Nimrod pulls live parts availability, datasheets,
> and errata — no more guessing from year-old training data
>
> - Works with claude.ai, Claude Desktop, Claude Code, VS Code, and any MCP client
> - 1 credit = 1 search · extraction always free · free 50-credit trial, no card
> - Official MCP Registry: `ai.orchis/nimrod`
## Why Konnect exists
Konnect is the successor to KiCAD-MCP-Server,
a Python/TypeScript project that proved AI-driven PCB design works — and, in the
process, showed exactly where that architecture runs out of road. Konnect was built
to fix those specific problems:
**The call path was too long.** In the original server, a single tool call travels
through TypeScript, schema validation, a spawned Python subprocess, JSON over
stdin/stdout, a command router, and finally SWIG-generated C++ proxy objects before
anything touches your board. That's four language and serialization boundaries, each
with its own failure modes — subprocess lifecycle management, stdout parsing that
filters out warnings KiCAD leaks into the stream, chunked-JSON reassembly. In
Konnect, a tool call is a function call. One process, one language, no plumbing.
**The dependency surface was enormous.** Running the original means carrying Node.js
and its npm tree, Python and its pip packages, wxPython, kicad-skip, and KiCAD's
SWIG bindings — two package ecosystems plus a binding layer, every one of them a
moving target that can break an install. Konnect is a single static binary —
20–25 MB depending on platform, a ~9 MB download. There is nothing to install
alongside it and nothing to version-match.
**SWIG is a dead end.** The original's PCB backend depends on KiCAD's SWIG Python
bindings, which KiCAD is deprecating in favor of its IPC API. SWIG also carried
real operational scars: a zone-fill call that can segfault the backend, proxy-object
comparison bugs, and a fallback path that can silently swap backends mid-session.
Konnect talks to KiCAD 10 through the official IPC API (protobuf over NNG) — the
interf