Show HN: An LLM-Powered Tool to Catch PCB Schematic Mistakes

Netlist.io is a web app that ingests your KiCad/Altium netlist and relevant datasheets so an LLM can reason about the actual circuit. It’s built to catch schematic mistakes that traditional ERC tools often miss, and it can even help debug already-fabbed boards by letting you describe the failure symptoms.

I built this because I was tired of shipping boards with avoidable mistakes — hopefully it saves you from a re-spin too!

Somewhat related: a while ago I was working on a project and wanted to use an RS485 to TTL conversion board which came with badly translated instructions. However, somebody had reverse engineered the design and uploaded an EasyEDA schematic. I shoved the raw JSON for the schematic (which looked quite cryptic to me) into Gemini 2.5 Pro and asked it if it could understand it, and it cheerfully responded with:

> Of course, Jack. I can understand the schematic from the provided JSON file. It describes an RS485 to TTL Converter Module. > Here is a detailed breakdown of the circuit's design and functionality

...followed by an absolutely reasonable description of the whole board. It was imprecise, but with some guidance (and by putting together my basic skills with Gemini) I was able to figure out a few things I needed to know about the board. Quite impressive.

Back in the day our hardware group created a pre-flight checklist before sending boards off to fab. This reduced our errors significantly and got rid of stupid mistakes. Your product idea sounds great and has ton of opportunity for additional features like supply chain analysis, alternate part sourcing, EMC advisory, etc.