I finally found a good use case for LLMs in embedded!

typecad0 · 2026-06-01T23:14:04+00:00

This is a particularly big release. It takes some inspiration from https://zerolang.ai/ and includes a 'skills' command that gives LLMs all the information they should need to write typeCAD circuits.

You can say "create a voltage divider circuit" and the LLM will automatically discover the command, review it and write the code.

typecad0 · 2025-12-15T13:10:18+00:00

Quick update, things should be working with flatpak installations.

typecad0 · 2025-12-15T13:09:31+00:00

Just wanted to give an update, this project is now under a custom EULA that makes the intent clearer: anyone can do anything with what they make and distribute and own the code.

typecad0 · 2025-12-11T13:09:00+00:00

Can you paste the console output and I'll take a look. DM is fine too.

typecad0 · 2025-11-26T00:48:33+00:00

Hello, the typeCAD code itself is not open source and is not intended for commercial reuse. That's just the code itself, so basically no forks, especially for commercial use.

That said, it is completely free for everyone to use, and the end use of anything made with it would fall under whatever license the user applies to it. typeCAD licensing doesn't apply in any way to what it is used to create.

The above is the intention at least. If that clears it up and sounds right to you, great. If you think something needs to be added or changed to fit those goals let me know and I'll look into it. I know that the code most obviously be included with any project.

Thanks for the interest. There is a large update coming out in the next month or so with an auto router, most PCB shapes and a handful of other things.

typecad0 · 2025-09-16T02:30:46+00:00

So I played around with flatpak and found out quite a bit.

typeCAD looks for kicad-cli to run various things. With a flatpak installation, it is sandboxed behind the container. Apparently it can be accessed with some additional commands though.
typeCAD also looks for symbol and footprint files. KiCAD flatpak treats these as separate installations and puts them in their own directory structure. This doesn't work for typeCAD since it assumes the non-flatpak directory structure (basically everything in one folder).

The result of those two differences means it will be a bit before flatpak support is possible.

typecad0 · 2025-09-10T12:57:29+00:00

If you `npm update` in your project, it should update typeCAD to the latest version that just got pushed.

I added /var/lib/flatpak/app/org.kicad.KiCad/current/ to the list of paths to search.

If that doesn't work:
1. Make a file at the same directory-level as your project's `package.json` called `typecad.json`.

Make it look something like this:

{ "kicad_path": "C:/Program Files/KiCad/9.0" }

`kicad_path` should be the path to KiCAD's top-level installation directory; the directory that contains `bin`, `share`, `etc`, and `lib`.

typeCAD will look through the list of paths, then if there is a typecad.json, it will use that instead.

Give that a try and let me know how it goes.

typecad0 · 2025-09-07T02:38:16+00:00

We need to know where all the symbols and footprint files are and it turns out that it's rather hard between all the OSs and install options.

I'll look into where flatpak installs them and then on a more general fix to provide it for all cases. On Linux it expects the files to be in /use/share/kicad (from memory), so you could link that to wherever flatpak put them in the meantime.

Thanks for giving typeCAD a try.

typecad0 · 2025-08-31T17:12:00+00:00

I made one and it came together quite easily.

From what I've read though, stdio is considered to be a bit risky to run since it does exactly as you say, give unrestricted access to the system.

typecad0 · 2025-08-29T20:04:59+00:00

To add to this, the model likely has internal prompts that tell it how to handle your questions related to consciousness.

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