SPICE simulation → oscilloscope → verified with Claude Code

When applying Claude Code to hardware development, describing circuits via natural language worked for simple circuits, but as complexity increased it became hard to express exactly what was intended. On the other hand, combining it with tools that can give immediate feedback made it much stronger.

The core idea is to give Claude access to an oscilloscope and a SPICE simulator. This allows fast, practical iteration on SPICE circuit and model verification, embedded programming, and data analysis.

In particular, for data analysis, tasks that used to be done manually by humans were greatly reduced.

• time axis normalization
• data alignment
• verification steps that used to be judged roughly by eye

The demo was intentionally kept simple, but it shows that the same approach scales well to more complex circuits and real embedded projects.

The lessons learned from operating it are also clear.

• Oscilloscope

  • Since Claude cannot directly see the physical wiring, it must be clearly told what is connected where.
  • It should always be made to use only the latest data, so it doesn't look at stale measurements.
  • Rather than putting raw data directly into the context, it's better to save it to a file and have Claude handle it indirectly.

• Microcontroller

  • An explicit pinout / pinmux map must be provided.
  • A Makefile with functions like build, flash, ping, and erase should be prepared in advance, and Claude should be made to follow it.
  • It's important not to let it assemble commands ad hoc.

The related repositories presented are lecroy-mcp, spicelib-mcp, and rc-filter-demo-files.