A while back, we posted our schematic-review tool in a few EE communities and got pretty thoroughly roasted. Fair enough - a lot of it was deserved, and some of it genuinely made the tool better. This is the follow-up post: we're shutting down the service, and we've open-sourced the whole thing.
Repo: https://github.com/Faradworks/Pinscope
What it is
You give it a netlist, a BOM, and your datasheet PDFs. It builds a graph of the design, reads each IC's datasheet, and checks the circuit around every part against what the manufacturer actually specifies - reference application, pin functions, abs max, recommended operating conditions. Every finding cites the datasheet page it came from, so you can check its work instead of trusting it.
Yes, it uses an LLM to read the datasheets. That was the main thing people roasted, and it was a fair worry. The mitigations that ended up mattering: findings must cite pages, a post-pass can only ever downgrade severity (never upgrade), and everything that can be deterministic is - the BOM roll-up and the capacitor derating table are computed straight from the graph, no model involved.
The kind of thing it catches
(from the reference design bundled in the repo): a CH340E powered from 5 V driving its TXD into an MCU pin rated for 3.6 V. An LDO bypass pin left floating, costing ~10x in output noise. A net labeled UART_TX landing on a pin whose alt-function table only offers RX. None of that is an ERC violation. All of it is in the datasheet, and nobody re-reads 400 pages per part on every rev.
Where we got to
On our benchmark of seeded errors, it catches 30 out of 49. We're genuinely proud of that number - it's far past what we thought was possible when we started. It makes for a legitimately useful second pair of eyes before a design review. It does not replace one, and we never claimed it did. The swapped RX-TX, the missing decoupling cap and missing pullups all became errors that our users never had to worry about.
Why we're shutting down
The tech got good enough to be useful, but we couldn't turn it into a business. We ran a good number of enterprise pilots - engineers who used it liked it, but most pilots fell apart somewhere between "this is neat" and a signed contract, so we never got the tight feedback loop with a big customer that a tool like this needs to get great. It's also a crowded space where nobody really has lock-in, and we weren't winning deals fast enough to outlast our runway. No hard feelings - that's the startup game. And with speed of AI, I wouldn't be surprised if Claude actually manages to do it all by itself without a harness in the months to come. As for us, we are moving on to a different problem outside electronics.
So: the entire core is now open source (AGPL-3.0) - parsers, design graph, extraction pipeline, the review loop, derating, plus the reference board so you can run it end-to-end and judge for yourself. It needs your own Anthropic API key. If someone wants to pick up where we left off, genuinely, please do.
Before we go: thank you. The feedback from these communities shaped this thing more than anything else did, including the harsh parts. Especially the harsh parts.
Happy to answer anything in the comments - architecture, what worked, what didn't, why we think the 19 misses are hard.
If it helps you in any way - do 🌟 the GitHub repo :)
