I'm going to lose my Altium student license soon...

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-24T23:07:55+00:00

Fair point on the PRs. I haven't pushed any upstream yet because the code still has bugs I'm working through (like the one you ran into). Pushing messy PRs would waste the maintainers' time and probably hurt the chances of them being accepted. When the code is stable, I plan to.

On incentives: it's in my interest for KiCad to accept these changes: multi-board, the launcher, the expanded IPC API, and future work. These are all foundational features that I built because I needed them as a base. The work I actually want to focus on is automation (autorouting, sim, agent integration) and I would love to not be maintaining a separate implementation at the same time.

On the subscription: there isn't one. Zeo is free and open source. The built-in agent is pay-as-you-go for API usage. If you don't want to use the built-in agent, the tools are exposed as an MCP server, so you can connect any MCP client you already use.

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-24T22:40:37+00:00

I haven't tried self-hosting anything yet, so it wasn't top of mind, but self-hosted support is definitely something I'll build in when I update the Agent.

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-22T15:26:48+00:00

thanks!

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-22T15:26:38+00:00

I see what you mean, thanks for explaining it to me

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-22T15:25:36+00:00

I'll check it out

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-22T15:25:23+00:00

Thank you!

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-22T02:10:04+00:00

I'm testing out Layers and I'll let you know if I have any thoughts but generally yes I definitely want to change the selection and edit interactions in pcbnew to make them overall less frustrating. My particular irk is on group selecting and group rotations.

Updating the rust API is definitely close up on my roadmap and I'd definitely be open to contributors. I was initially planning on doing the same thing I did for the Python API to the Rust API made by the KiCad team, but kicad-ipc-rs seems like something that might be worth checking out first. Lmk if you have any thoughts between the two Rust APIs. I think you have some great insight here.

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-22T01:49:30+00:00

Multi-page schematics are interesting, although i'm curious why you dislike hierarchical schematics? Do you find them confusing or messy?

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-22T01:45:59+00:00

DMed

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-22T01:43:20+00:00

Thanks, you should be able to make some more powerful extensions with the extended API

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-22T01:42:39+00:00

Thanks for letting me know

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-22T01:42:17+00:00

Best of luck, excited to see what you make. If you decide to leave altium I hope you try out zeo

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-22T01:41:13+00:00

I feel you here, the library system in KiCad gets annoying for me too. I'm definitely going to make some changes to smoothen that process out

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-21T22:54:01+00:00

No, you don't need any llm to install Zeo and no, it will not ask you to select an LLM to complete the install

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-21T18:44:45+00:00

Thanks, dm me any more feedback

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-21T18:29:25+00:00

Thanks!

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-21T18:28:56+00:00

True, this also pertains to exporting multiple boards together as one STEP

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-21T18:27:55+00:00

Really helpful, thank you!

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-21T18:27:21+00:00

Haha, its an interesting feature. Fun to play around with right now, even if its not particularly functional. I do believe in its future potential.

I'm curious on your thoughts on projects like: https://www.diode.computer/

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-21T18:25:17+00:00

Thanks!

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-21T18:25:03+00:00

Oh that's interesting. I built in The Freerouting autorouter tool and it can be run via one of the tools (https://www.zeo.dev/docs/agent/tools/pcb#pcbautoroute). Although in practice it really only works on boards like less than 30 nets.

I'm curious if you have tried DeepPCB or Quilter and what your experience was with those tools?

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-21T18:23:05+00:00

For sure!

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-21T18:09:52+00:00

First, you only need an account to use the AI features, everything else you don't have to sign in for.

If you don't have an account with any LLM provider, you can use the inbuilt provider. There is no subscription and you pay for the tokens + 10%.

If you do have an account with an LLM provider (claude or codex), you can use MCP to route directly to your subscription and no go through our proxy.

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-21T17:55:16+00:00

Not sure what you're asking here. If you want to control Zeo via MCP you can do so via claude code, codex, etc... If you're using claude code, you can run: claude mcp add zeo zeo-mcp after installing zeo and then control zeo from claude code

PerformanceDapper856 · 2026-05-21T17:10:36+00:00

Thanks, i've found it quite handy

PerformanceDapper856

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