Bench gear
Bench supplies, electronic loads and smart plugs that an agent uses to power-cycle a board or measure what it draws.
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.
5 mo ago
mcp-strumentazione connects Claude to a Tektronix TBS2204B oscilloscope over LXI and to an HP GPIB bench through 2 MCP servers. The bench server drives a 6632A supply, 6060B electronic load, 5334B counter and 3457A meter. The README includes measurements Claude took through them, among them a mains waveform and a lamp I-V sweep.
57 d ago
Agent Debug Probe connects a coding agent to a target through an RP2040 probe and MCP adapter. The agent can switch target power and USB data, drive reset and boot straps, and use SWD/JTAG and UART. A validation report dated 8 August logs bench tests of the fabricated board, including an 8.66 MB UART transfer to a Zynq target.
2 mo ago
labgrid-mcp puts a labgrid hardware lab behind 47 MCP tools, from reserving a board to switching its power and reading its serial console. SSH commands and, when enabled, flashing are also covered; flashing and other irreversible actions are off by default. The README's demo GIF shows Claude driving the built-in fake lab, with no hardware attached.
3 mo ago
Jacob Beningo's devusb switches, monitors and power-cycles USB ports from a CLI or an MCP server. It drives Yepkit YKUSH hubs over HID and other switchable hubs through uhubctl. When a probe or board hangs, the agent cycles its port instead of asking for a replug. The README marks the YKUSH3 and two generic hub chipsets as verified on hardware.
3 mo ago
Jacob Beningo's devpsu sets voltage and current, switches the output and power-cycles a board from a CLI or MCP server. It supports three B&K Precision 168xB models and Manson HCS-3xxx supplies. Session limits come from the user through an MCP prompt; environment ceilings refuse anything higher. The README says it was built against a 1687B.
Ranked by points weighed against age. New entries with early votes rise.
21 d ago
In September Nordic Semiconductor added skills to its Nordic MCP server that drive a Power Profiler Kit II and SEGGER J-Link probes. The PPK2 skill captures long measurement runs and flags anomalies against a reference pattern; the debug skill runs GDB sessions. The nRF Connect extension for VS Code now shares build context. The post shows no runs.
3 mo ago
On FastLED's unattended bench, an RP2040 stopped enumerating over USB after it was flashed with an I2S microphone sketch. Elevated device restarts and disable-enable cycles all failed. The issue says a port restart resets the bus but never cuts VBUS. The follow-up lists a switchable hub, an SWD probe and a watchdog that falls back to BOOTSEL.
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.
3 mo ago
The FPGA Developer blog describes giving Claude Code control of programming, UART and power cycling on an AMD FPGA bench. In the post's example, the agent ports a reference design to a new dev board, then tests and fixes it there. The author says such ports take a few hours. The post also covers token use and hooks.
4 mo ago
Linutronix describes an off-the-shelf AI agent that tests embedded boards in its lab through a small MCP server. In the example session the agent reserves a board, flashes it, reads the console and power-cycles it after a bad flash. The post argues that the safety comes from the lab underneath. It shows one screenshot and no logs.
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.
