Area
Agents controlling bench instruments and test equipment: taking measurements, sweeping settings and logging results without a person at the knobs.
The most active tools first.
16 d ago
bench-mcp exposes SCPI power supplies, multimeters and oscilloscopes to an agent through 10 MCP tools, with no tool that sends raw SCPI. Voltage and current limits come from a file a person signs off, read once at start-up and enforced by a pure function before every command. The README says it has run only against simulated instruments.
18 d ago
Tramuntana is an open bench tool built on the RP2350 (Raspberry Pi Pico 2) and Zephyr that works over one USB cable. It has SPI and I2C master and sniffer modes, a 2-channel 500 kS/s scope, a waveform generator, an 8-channel logic analyzer and a UART bridge. Its Python package adds an MCP server. The README shows no captures.
18 d ago
AWIC controls FX2-based USB logic analyzers and oscilloscopes that sigrok supports, from a Rust server with native USB drivers. Agents reach it through MCP, people through a web UI and scripts through an SCPI socket; it also switches USB hub port power. It runs on Linux and was built with Claude Code. The README says every feature works on hardware.
34 d ago
K-Dense's LabMCP connects Claude and other assistants to lab instruments through 32 MCP servers. They cover balances, hotplate stirrers, syringe pumps, spectrometers, potentiostats and other instruments. Each server checks commands against user-set safety limits and logs them, and each has a practice mode. The README marks all 32 as tested only in simulation, from the makers' manuals.
35 d ago
debug-devices connects coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex to a repair bench through an MCP server. The agent drives an Android phone camera with zoom and torch, reads a multimeter through a webcam and a vision model, and finds parts, nets and test points in the board's boardview file. The README's clip shows the monitor page only.
4 mo ago
oscilloscope-mcp connects Claude Code, Cursor or a custom agent to a Rigol DS1000Z oscilloscope over LAN SCPI. A profile lists the series' 15 trigger types and about 95 parameters, and the server checks requests against it before sending. A compare tool diffs captured edges against an RTL simulation. The README shows an agent-configured four-channel capture on a DS1104Z.
Ranked by points weighed against age. New entries with early votes rise.
2 mo ago
In an Octopart video, one prompt sends Claude Code through a digital low-pass filter on a Digilent Cmod S7 FPGA board. It writes and simulates the filter, then programs the board over JTAG. Through MCP servers for an Analog Discovery 2 and a Rigol scope, it sweeps test tones at 1, 5 and 15 kHz against the 10 kHz cutoff.
2 mo ago
Anthropic opened a research preview of the Model Hardware Standard, a shared driver spec for agents that operate lab and manufacturing devices. Each device describes its settings and enforced safety limits, and agents reach it over MCP, a CLI or code. In a QuEra case study, an agent-improved laser relock script worked in 99.3% of 700 trials.
45 d ago
Asraful Haque and colleagues released an open-source toolkit for agent-driven RHEED (reflection high-energy electron diffraction) on a pulsed laser deposition system. It adds programmable electron-optics control, automatic beam alignment and rocking-curve capture, with analysis served over MCP. The paper describes a demo driven by natural-language requests. We found no code link.
6 mo ago
Lucas Gerads connected Claude Code to his LeCroy oscilloscope through lecroy-mcp and to ngspice through spicelib-mcp. In the post's 12-minute video, Claude simulates an RC low-pass filter, programs an ATtiny1614 to drive it and compares the scope traces with the simulation. Gerads warns that Claude cannot see the bench and needs an explicit pinout.
2 mo ago
In a Design News article, Jacob Beningo describes three tricks for using AI agents in embedded development. He recommends putting debuggers and logic analyzers behind MCP servers and grounding driver code in datasheets through retrieval. He power-cycles boards with uhubctl, a Yepkit YKUSH hub or two BK Precision 1685B supplies. The article reports no measured results.
2 mo ago
Zahra Ayar, Georg Fantner and colleagues published a paper on three MCP-connected agents that run an atomic force microscope. One converts plain-language requests to checked commands, one judges image quality and retunes imaging, and one diagnoses artifacts. In live experiments, the paper says, the tuning agent did as well as expert operators. No code is linked.
4 mo ago
Researchers put an LLM agent in charge of a trapped-ion experiment's ARTIQ control code through an MCP server. Every tool call needs a token bound to its contents, issued by a human or after a simulated run stays within device limits. The paper reports that the agent built a calibration stack and, with operator guidance, closed a magnetic-field stabilization loop.
5 mo ago
Chunhui Li and Wei Fan describe RFIA, an RF instrument agent whose LLM plans while a deterministic runtime operates the instrument. A knowledge base supplies verified skills, workflow templates and SCPI command lookup. On a commercial vector network analyzer, the paper reports all 16 benchmark tasks handled with both MiniMax-M2.7 and Qwen3.6-27B, including 1 expected safety rejection.
5 mo ago
Keysight has released version 0.1 of its MCP Server for Instrument Control as a Windows executable. The release notes list 18 tools that discover VISA instruments, resolve SCPI commands from each instrument's definition file and run them. An engineer approves a plain-language preview of every command before it reaches hardware. Sessions are logged, and a simulation mode needs no instruments.
8 mo ago
Ari Mahpour shows how he wrapped Digilent's WaveForms SDK in a FastMCP server to control an Analog Discovery 2 from an IDE. The article's figures show MCP tool calls capturing a waveform and generating a signal. A 3.3 V sine request came out at 6.6 V peak-to-peak, and he saves large captures to files rather than returning them.
