I've been spending a ridiculous amount of time lately building AI-powered tools, and I wanted to share what I've been up to because some of it is going to be really useful for you.

1. PCB Design Review Tool

I've been building a tool that can take your Gerber files or KiCad files, review your schematic and PCB layout, and then generate a full design review report with all the findings.

Think of it like having an experienced engineer look over your design and flag potential issues before you send it off for manufacturing.

I've tested it on a couple of designs so far and the results have been accurate, which is exciting.

But I'm not rushing this one out the door because it needs more validation before I'd feel comfortable sharing it.

My next step is to run it against a bunch more example designs and then manually verify every single finding to make sure it's catching real issues and not missing anything obvious.

I built this using Claude Opus 4.6, which is Anthropic's most advanced AI model, inside something called Claude Projects.

Projects has been a game changer because it keeps all the context the AI needs in one place, so I don't have to re-explain everything from scratch on each new chat.

2. Agentic AI with OpenClaw

I've also been going deep on agentic AI, specifically using a platform called OpenClaw.

If you're not familiar with the term, most AI is just a chat where you type a question and get an answer back, but agentic AI actually goes and does things for you by connecting with your tools, your apps, and your data, sometimes even without you
telling it to do each step.

A big breakthrough for me a few weeks ago was discovering MCP servers, which let you connect Claude to tools like Google Sheets, Google Docs, and pretty much anything else.

I'm using Zapier MCP to wire it all together, and it's what made a lot of this stuff possible.

But using MCP through Claude is still basically a chat interface, so it only does things when you ask it to.

That's where OpenClaw comes in, because it's more autonomous and you can set it up to handle regular tasks on its own without you having to prompt it each time.

I've spent many dozens of hours working with OpenClaw and it's definitely not user-friendly, but once you get things configured it's really powerful.

One of the most exciting uses is having it do something that almost every hardware founder hates... marketing.

I've always encouraged founders to focus on development and marketing at the same time from the start, but that's always been hard to do.

Now you can focus on development while your team of AI agents is out there doing your marketing and building your waitlist of potential buyers.

I'm going to be making some videos on specific use cases for hardware founders and developers, so keep an eye out for those.

3. Academy Community Dashboard

One thing I built with OpenClaw is a dashboard that lets my team and I track all of the discussions happening inside the Hardware Academy community.

The whole goal was to speed up our response time and make sure we never miss a question from a member, even when someone comments on an older thread.

I'm running OpenClaw on a totally separate, clean computer because it essentially has full control of whatever machine it's on, so you don't want it anywhere near your banking info or personal files.

Then I have a second, faster computer running a local open-source AI model for processing the community data.

It still blows my mind that I can run a pretty advanced open-source AI on a $400 mini PC sitting on my desk.

Because it's all local, nothing from the community ever gets sent to cloud AI companies like OpenAI or Google, it all stays on my own server.

And just to be clear, we're not using AI to answer anyone's questions in the community, it's only helping us make sure nothing slips through the cracks.

4. Content Dashboard

The other thing I built is a content dashboard that replaces the giant spreadsheet I was using to manage my video production, publishing, and distribution.

It's custom-built for exactly how I work, and it's already saving me a ton of time.

I'm really excited about all of this, and I think agentic AI is going to change how hardware entrepreneurs work in a big way.

In fact, I think SaaS is slowly dying and hardware founders are the big winners in the long run, and that's the topic of my video next week.

More to come soon.

Talk soon,
John