Backplane is an open-source workspace for agentic hardware development. Your agent edits KiCad and FreeCAD files; you follow the work in board, schematic, 3D and mechanical viewers, click a part, and talk about it.

• Your agent, your choice. Claude, Codex, Grok, OpenCode, Muse Code, Antigravity, Pi and Oh My Pi, in one workspace.
• A KiCad fork built for agents. Backplane KiCad adds board and schematic IPC APIs so agents can edit through KiCad.
• Design history. Changes to boards and schematics are checkpointed. Revisit earlier steps, compare versions, and leave review comments.
• Desktop, web and phones. The desktop app, browser, iOS and Android clients connect to the hub.
• MIT licensed. Made and maintained by electrical engineers.

curl -fsSL https://github.com/BackplaneWorks/Backplane/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sh
backplane

Download backplane-v<version>-windows-x64.zip from the latest release, extract the entire archive into a writable folder, and open Backplane.exe. Keep resources/ and the other extracted files beside it. This is a portable Electron app with a Bun hub; no WSL is required. Shell commands still need Cygwin tools: keep the bundled runtime when supplied. If those tools are missing, the Windows setup script installs Cygwin; add its bin directory to PATH before launching Backplane. Install your agent CLIs and sign in separately; the provider setup script installs Claude and Codex.

Install FreeCAD and the Backplane KiCad runtime separately. Set BACKPLANE_FREECAD to the actual bin/FreeCADCmd.exe (with the GUI executable beside it) and BACKPLANE_KICAD to the runtime root or its bin/kicad-cli.exe, then restart Backplane. Stock KiCad lacks some required IPC capabilities.

Windows managed service stop and update are unsupported; closing the window leaves the hub running. Windows CI smoke checks currently report failures without gating the build, so a published ZIP alone does not establish full Windows validation.

See installation for setup, phone pairing and uninstalling. You need an agent CLI, KiCad for board and schematic work, and FreeCAD for mechanical work. Antigravity can be installed from Settings.

1. Start Backplane and add a project folder: an existing KiCad project or an empty folder.
2. Pick an agent, model and reasoning effort under the composer.
3. Ask for something: "add a 3.3 V LDO and decoupling to the schematic", "check the DRC and fix it", or "design a case for this board".
4. Follow the work in the Board, Schematic, 3D and Mech tabs. Click components or nets to highlight them across the schematic and board, or reference a part in your next message.

The viewers show the design as the agent works.

• Board, Schematic, 3D. Hierarchical schematics, layer controls in KiCad’s order and names, and cross-probing between views.
• Mech. View STEP or GLB models. Agents model parts with FreeCAD scripts, export STEP, and show the result here. Mechanical-only folders need no KiCad project; see the mechanical quickstart.
• History and review. Compare versions, inspect changes by sheet and layer, pin comments to a board or schematic, and run BOM, ERC and DRC checks from the Review tab.
• Skills. KiCad skills from KiStack ship with the app: schematic, layout, footprints, BOM and fabrication exports.
• Ordering. When a design has a fab file, Buy it opens a thread that checks the design and gets a quote. See ordering.

Projects contain threads. Agents can start subagents using other providers, and threads can message each other. An "uberbot" can coordinate bots, projects and threads as your main interface.

Catbots are persistent agents for specific jobs. They have webhooks and routines, a mailbox for communication, and a "space" where the bot serves a persistent web app.

• Clickable links between threads, bots and projects.

  

• References to other Backplane items with >, #, %, @.

  

• Inline terminals for TUIs.

  

• /btw for side questions.

  

• A secret vault: agents use API keys and tokens by name without seeing their values.

• Voice dictation, push alerts to your phone, and git, worktree and PR actions in the thread.

One hub per machine owns the event log, agent processes, git and file watchers. The desktop app, browser, iOS and Android clients connect to that hub, and your machines can pair over Tailscale. Agents edit KiCad through the fork’s IPC server. The hub is written in Bend and runs on Bun. Important rules are stated as laws in LAWS.bend, with proofs in PROOF.bend checked by the compiler.

• Install, settings, secrets
• KiCad IPC, design review, git
• Bots, rooms and routines, the uberbot, terminals
• Ordering, voice, telemetry
• AGENTS.md: the code map

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Building needs Bend, Bun and Python 3.12+. Start with AGENTS.md for the code map and local testing for isolated builds and previews. The desktop guide covers the Electron shell, and the mobile guide covers the phone apps.

MIT. See LICENSE. The KiCad fork retains KiCad's licensing. The STEP converter includes OpenCascade and occt-import-js (LGPL-2.1); see third-party licensing.