A KiCad backend, at parity with Altium

[salitronic]

New feature: eda-agent now drives KiCad, not just Altium. The idea was that the main flows should be identical whichever tool you use, so the same review, export, authoring and design work you have run against Altium now runs against a KiCad project, and a review in KiCad tells you what a review in Altium would.

Altium stays the default and existing setups are untouched. You choose the backend with the EDA_AGENT_BACKEND environment variable (altium, kicad or both) or the --backend flag. Because MCP clients set environment per server, someone who uses both tools registers two servers pointing at the same binary, one for each, and each sees only its own tool set.

The review side is EDA-agnostic underneath: both backends feed a normalized snapshot of the board and netlist into one shared engine, so annotation, connectivity, shorts, decoupling and net-class checks behave the same on either tool. On KiCad the backend also reads boards and projects, runs schematic, PCB and full-project reviews, runs DRC and ERC, builds BOMs and netlists, and exports every format kicad-cli produces, from Gerbers and drill files through STEP, GLB, VRML, PDF and IPC-2581.

It authors as well as reads: place, move, rotate and lock components, edit values, and create tracks, vias, zones, text and graphics, plus footprint and symbol libraries. The largest piece is end-to-end generation. Hand it a design plan and it emits a complete, openable KiCad project (the schematic, the board and the project file) with real library symbols and footprints and a connectivity-aware placement. The offline calculators and plan checks are shared with the Altium side since they are pure physics, and kicad_cli and kicad_run_action are escape hatches for anything not wrapped yet.

It talks to KiCad over the supported IPC API (kicad-python) and the bundled kicad-cli, so there is nothing to install on the KiCad side beyond enabling the API server, and it needs KiCad 9 or newer. As with the rest of the project this is new and not every path is heavily tested, so keep a backup of anything you point the authoring tools at. Setup and the full tool list are in the readme and the tool reference.