Changelog
What’s new in Electronics Architect, most recent first. The landing page shows the latest five.
Converter efficiency curves you can read straight off the spec sheet
A switching converter's efficiency curve is now set by three numbers from its spec sheet: its No-Load Power, its Peak Efficiency and its efficiency at full load. Shape it on the plot: the handle at the left end of the curve slides sideways to set the light-load roll-off, the peak handle sits where the curve actually tops out, and the full-load handle sets the droop. The curve follows a real converter's losses, so it can no longer bulge above its handles. The separate light-load mode is gone, because the no-load power covers it: a converter that was set to power-save now takes its light-load behavior from its no-load power, so lower that to match the spec sheet. When a converter runs away from its spec-sheet conditions, at another input voltage or temperature, the plot shows the spec-sheet curve dashed and the curve it is solved on solid.
Converters run hotter in a hot box, and the NASA check follows NASA's own limits
Set a design's surroundings above room temperature and a switching converter now loses more power, and runs hotter, than the same part on a cool bench, because the resistance of its switch and inductor rises with temperature the way a real part's does; below room temperature it loses less. A converter that would keep heating itself with no stable temperature is now called out as thermal runaway. For an exact figure, enter its Series R at 100% Duty from the spec sheet. The NASA parts-stress check now uses the limits NASA's own parts document sets for the parts it covers, so a few designs that passed before now show a part running too hot.
Converter efficiency at light load, and a step-down at full duty
A switching converter can now say how it runs at light load. Set Light-Load Mode to power-save and its losses fall with the load, the way most modern step-down parts behave at a few milliamps, instead of the full-speed switching loss the curve assumes otherwise. You can also enter one light-load point from the datasheet curve. A step-down converter whose input falls to its output now behaves like its switch held fully on: its output follows the input less the drop across that switch and the inductor, and the current it draws equals the current it delivers. Enter that resistance as Series R at 100% Duty for an exact figure. A step-down asked for more than its input is now marked critical, as a linear regulator is.
See the worst case, and a battery from empty to full
The tolerance menu adds Worst: each part's spec-sheet spread pushed the way that draws more power and makes more heat, so you see your design on its worst day. An AI assistant connected to Electronics Architect can now check a battery-powered design at empty, half and full charge in one step. And a step-down converter now warns when its input gets too close to its output to hold its voltage.
Use it from Claude on the free plan
A free account can now connect Claude, or another AI app, to Electronics Architect, with no card needed. Sign in once and Claude can build your power design, work out the current, efficiency and heat of every stage, and save it to your account, with 10 solves a month through Claude. The editor does the same calculations without a limit, and Pro removes the monthly limit and adds PDF and BOM export.
Long runs now count down
Monte Carlo runs, AI reviews, AI Synthesis, exports and spec-sheet parsing now show a countdown while they work, so a long run never looks stuck. For Monte Carlo the estimate comes from the solver’s measured speed for a design your size; for the rest it comes from your own recent runs. It rounds up, so most runs finish early, and if one takes longer the meter says what it is still waiting on. While you wait, a Monte Carlo run shows parts piling up into a bell curve, an AI review sweeps across your own power tree, and a power-design tip changes every few seconds.
Find Electronics Architect in Claude’s connector directory
Electronics Architect is now listed in Claude’s connector directory, so you can add it to Claude without pasting an address: find it there, sign in once, and Claude can build, solve and save power designs in your account. Pro and Team plans. Update, Oct 10: a free account can connect too, with 10 solves a month through the app.
AI reviews check the parts they suggest
When your AI assistant, or a script through the API, asks for an AI review, the review now solves the whole design and sets aside any part it would suggest that is not rated for the voltage it would see.
A battery-powered sensor board to start from
The template gallery adds 2S Li-Ion Sensor: a sensor board that runs 5 V, 3.3 V and 1.8 V supplies from a two-cell lithium-ion battery through three Texas Instruments regulators. Open it in the editor and adapt it to your own board. An AI assistant connected to Electronics Architect designed it first.
Three new calculators: linear regulator heat, boost converter, power budget
Three more free calculators, no account needed. The LDO calculator shows how much heat a low-dropout regulator gives off at each input voltage, how hot the chip gets and the heat sink it needs. The boost converter calculator sizes the inductor and output capacitor and checks that the chip can handle the peak current. The power budget adds up a tree of regulators into the current drawn from the source, the losses and the battery life, and any LDO in it opens in the LDO calculator with its numbers filled in.
Try Pro or Team free for a week
Both paid plans on the pricing page now have a “Start a free trial” button. Pick Pro, for one engineer, or Team, for a group sharing designs, then sign in, choose monthly or yearly, and go through checkout. The trial lasts 7 days, one per person: checkout takes a card but charges nothing until the trial ends, and canceling before then costs nothing.
Connect your AI assistant on a free trial
When you connect Claude or any MCP client to Electronics Architect from a free account, the sign-in page now offers Pro’s 7-day free trial, one per person. Pick monthly or yearly, go through checkout, and you land back on the same page to finish connecting, with no need to start over in the assistant. Nothing is charged during the trial, and canceling before it ends costs nothing. Update, Oct 10: a free account no longer needs the trial to connect; it gets 10 solves a month through the app, and the sign-in page still offers the trial.
Every report PDF now reads the same way
The derating report and the Engineering Dossier now follow the tolerance report’s layout: the finding up front, a table ranking every part by its worst measurement, a verdict on each measurement (over the limit, close to it, or clear) and a plain-English glossary. The derating report also gets a chart with one bar per measurement, running from zero to the part’s own rating with the limit marked on it, so you can see at a glance how much margin is left.
The tolerance report leads with what it found
The PDF from a tolerance run opens with its finding in a sentence or two (what held, what is tight and what to change first) above a table ranking every part by its worst measurement. Each measurement gets one of three verdicts: outside its limit, inside but with no room to spare, or clear. The middle one matters, because a part with no room to spare may not keep passing as parts vary. Every chart has both axes labeled and the limits drawn on it, and a short glossary explains each term the report uses.
Long tolerance runs from your AI assistant or a script
Large tolerance runs, the ones that check how a design holds up as its parts vary, can now be started from your AI assistant, or from a script through the API. Your assistant follows the run and, after its first check, tells you roughly how long it will take (about two minutes, say, or about an hour) before you commit to waiting.
Derating checks from your AI assistant or a script
Your AI assistant, or a script through the API, can now run the same derating check as the editor’s Derating panel: it checks that every rated part stays a safe margin below its ratings under NASA GSFC (space flight) or IPC-9592 (commercial) rules, with a verdict for each part and what to change. Because it is the same check, it grades a part exactly as the panel does, and it does not count against your monthly allowance.
The page outline is the sheet your PDF prints on
Turn it on in Canvas → Page setup and the canvas shows the A4, Letter or 16:9 page that Export Studio will produce, with the drawing border where the PDF puts it, so the outline on screen is the page you get. The toolbar is simpler too: File holds the bill of materials and Share, Canvas holds Page setup, and Export opens Export Studio in one click. Update, Oct 24: the bill of materials moved to Export → Bill of Materials; Share is still in File. You can also place parts from the keyboard: Tab to one in the palette and press Enter.
A developers page for connecting your AI assistant
The developers page shows how to connect Claude or any MCP client, with the settings to paste for each kind of client, how to use the API instead, and three worked examples: designing from a brief, reviewing a design you already have, and changing something to see what it did. Every tool also tells your assistant whether it only reads or can change something, so it can check with you before overwriting a design.
Hand a design to your AI assistant, and get it back on the canvas
When your AI assistant creates or changes a design, the link it gives you opens it straight on the canvas, with a banner saying which API key made it and when. See what changed shows the earlier version, with Restore one click away. Going the other way, Copy MCP snippet in the share dialog gives your assistant what it needs to open the design you are looking at. And every warning in the panel carries the same code your assistant sees, so you can both point to the same one.
Top-up packs, and 250 Monte Carlo runs a month on Pro
Pro’s Monte Carlo allowance goes from 100 to 250 runs a month. And when a month’s allowance does run out, Pro and Team accounts don’t have to wait for the reset: the limit dialog offers a $5 top-up pack (50 Monte Carlo runs, 20 AI reviews, or 5 AI Synthesis generations with 50 refinements), paid once, added to the account, never expiring, and used only after the monthly allowance. Nothing recurs and the plan does not change. Your AI assistant sees the pack balance too, and when it reaches a limit it is told what would unblock it.
See what each API key is doing, and cap it
Account → Developer now shows, for every API key, how many calls it made today and over the last 30 days, split by what they were: solving, exporting, AI review. Set a key’s requests-per-minute limit when you create it, and change it later without making a new key. On a Team plan the admin issues keys for the team from the same place and sees the same figures for each of them.
Exported drawings say what solved them, and can be checked
Schematic PDFs and images now end with one line: the solver release that produced them, a fingerprint of the design as solved, the date, and a link to the verify page. Anyone handed the drawing can open that link and paste in the design to watch it re-solved and its fingerprint checked; if the design has a view-only public link, the link does that on its own. Your AI assistant can also compare two versions of a design and tell you what the change did to losses, efficiency and warnings.
One AI review instead of two buttons
Explain and Suggest are now one button, AIDR (AI Design Review). In a single pass it says what your solved numbers mean, from losses and thermal margin to reliability risks, part by part, then what to change and what it would gain. Every review ends with a link to post the design to Community Design Reviews, for the opinion only another engineer can give. Your AI assistant can ask for a review too.
Connect Claude or any MCP client to the tool
Electronics Architect is now an MCP server you can add to an AI assistant by address: paste https://electronics-architect.com/mcp into the client, sign in once, and the tools appear. Your assistant can start from a template, check and solve a design, run a tolerance analysis, save it to your account, share it and export it, on the same solver and the same monthly allowances as the editor. Every design it saves lands in My Designs for you to open and review. Signing in creates an ordinary API key labeled with the app’s name under Account → Developer, where one click revokes it. Pro and Team plans; details at /developers/api. Update, Oct 10: a free account can connect too, with 10 solves a month through the app; API keys for scripts are still Pro and Team.
An API for scripts and AI assistants
Pro and Team accounts can now create API keys under Account → Developer and drive the tool from code: check a design for errors, solve it, run a repeatable tolerance analysis, save it to your account, share it, and export the bill of materials, on the same solver and the same monthly allowances as the editor. Designs a script or assistant saves show up in My Designs, ready for you to open and review. The reference, with a full worked example in curl, Python and TypeScript, is at /developers/api.
A warning when a supply is too weak to hold up its converter
Switching converters draw more current as their input voltage sags, so too weak a supply can make a design stop working. The simulator now flags converters close to that point, including ones behind a coil-and-capacitor input filter that can resonate, and says what would fix it, down to the damping a resonant filter needs.
Tell the tool what kind of converter you are using
Pick a converter type and the simulator checks whether it can actually make the voltage you asked for, and says so when it cannot.
Mains-powered designs now show the current their rectifier really draws
A rectifier with a smoothing capacitor pulls its current in short, tall pulses rather than a smooth sine. The simulator now works out that pulse for your circuit: the peak current your diodes must survive, the heavier current your transformer, wiring and fuse must be sized for, the power factor and distortion that come with it, and whether the capacitor is rated for the ripple it has to absorb. It also screens single-phase designs on 230 V mains, from 75 to 600 W, against the European limits on harmonic current.
Team designs now remember who changed what
Anyone on a team with the Editor role can save changes straight back to a shared design. Every save keeps the previous version, records who made it and the note they left, and shows up in the team's activity feed.
Share links that expire on their own
A public link to a design can now be set to run out after a day, a week, a month or three months. Send a supplier a power tree for a quote without leaving the door open afterwards. Expiry is your choice for each link, and the share dialog shows when an existing one runs out.
Find a real part without leaving your design
Search a part number, or browse the DigiKey catalog, and the brand, package and spec sheet come straight in. We rank live distributor results against the operating conditions already on your sheet, so the parts that fit best float to the top, and the filters cut a catalog of millions down to a handful worth reading. It works for the loads in your design too: look up a microcontroller, FPGA, sensor or memory part and its running current fills in the load.
The divider calculator shows its working
Tell the divider calculator the tolerance you need and it hands back the cheapest standard resistor pair that hits it. Then it shows how much of your tolerance each source of error uses up: the supply, the resistors and their drift with temperature. You also get the output impedance your ADC cares about, and if a target isn’t reachable it tells you which change would get you there.
Paste a spec sheet, get a part
Some parts we don’t have yet. Paste the text from a spec sheet and we’ll turn it into a part you can use, saved to My Parts and private to you. If it’s one other engineers would want, a single checkbox offers it up for review.
Know where every number came from
Every spec on a part now shows its origin: checked by hand, confirmed by other engineers, pulled from DigiKey, or read off a spec sheet by AI. Type over a value yourself and it says that too.
Find out how many will pass
No two parts are exactly alike, even with the same part number. Give us the limits your design has to hit and we’ll estimate what share of units would pass, before you build a board.
Works on tablets
Pinch to zoom, drag to place, tap to inspect. Build or review a design at the bench instead of back at your desk.
Exports worth handing over
Save a design as a crisp image or a print-ready PDF with a proper drawing border. Export your analysis as a report, or bundle the lot into one document to send to a colleague or a client.
Diodes that match their spec sheet
A diode can now behave the way its spec sheet says. Pick one from the built-in library, or paste in the numbers from a spec sheet and we’ll work out the rest and tell you how close the match is.
Community-checked part data
If you find a wrong number in our parts database, propose a correction and other users vote on it. Anything still in dispute gets flagged on your design, so you can see which numbers are being questioned.
Share a design, get feedback
Post a working design to Community Design Reviews and ask other engineers what they’d do differently. They can reply and vote, and anything enough readers report as spam is hidden.
Drag to set efficiency
Shape a converter’s efficiency curve by dragging it, using the same numbers manufacturers publish. The simulation keeps up as you drag, so you see the effect straight away.
Describe it, we’ll draw it
Say what you need in plain English and the Generate button builds the design for you. Take it from there yourself, or keep asking for changes.
Spec sheets one click away
Parts you pick link straight to the manufacturer’s spec sheet, right there in the sidebar.
Zener diodes
Add a Zener diode from the parts palette, set its breakdown voltage, and see a graph of how it behaves in both directions.
Start at the wall socket
A design no longer has to begin at a DC rail. Transformers, rectifiers, inverters and motors, single or three-phase, sit alongside your DC circuits in the same drawing.