Co-founder Inky Ganbold is pitching a browser workspace where engineers can fork open boards, edit them with AI and export files for fabrication.
By [Ryan Merket](https://runtimewire.com/author/ryan-merket)
· Published
Primary source: [X](https://x.com/heypcbai/status/2102597124760449345)
Why it matters #
HeyPCB is pairing AI-assisted board design with a catalog of reusable open-hardware projects. The bet is that easier discovery and forking can shorten hardware iteration, but the library count does not establish design quality or manufacturing readiness.
HeyPCB has launched Circuit World, a browser-based library and design workspace that it says contains more than 8,800 open-hardware boards engineers can reuse instead of starting from a blank design. The launch puts co-founder and CTO Inky Ganbold (@1nkfy), who began designing boards as a teenager, behind a product built around a familiar complaint: hardware projects lack the easy-to-fork collaboration software developers take for granted.
In its September 23rd post on X, HeyPCB described Circuit World as an AI-native electronic design automation and mechanical CAD platform for designing, iterating, collaborating, versioning and preparing hardware for manufacturing in one browser. The company’s product site describes the library as 8,800-plus published open-hardware boards, indexed by the components they use. Examples include a Pocket Science Lab, a Watchy smartwatch and a solar battery-management board, each shown with a design license and technical details.
The library is the more consequential part of the pitch. AI assistance for schematic and board layout is one feature; making thousands of existing designs easier to inspect and modify gives HeyPCB a potential source of starting points, examples and community contributions. Users can open a design, fork it, and publish a modified version. That model depends on whether the projects are documented well enough to be useful and whether edits preserve the electrical and mechanical details that make a board manufacturable.
Ganbold’s own background tracks the problem the platform is trying to solve. On his personal site, he says a line-follower contest in 2017 drew him into board design. He later founded Mongolia’s teen robotics national team, worked in embedded systems at Infineon and ran board-design workshops for JLCPCB. Before HeyPCB, he built a tool to convert EasyEDA Pro projects into KiCad-ready files, an earlier attempt at smoothing a frustrating handoff between design formats.
HeyPCB’s current product materials describe an AI agent that turns plain-language requests into schematic and board-layout files in KiCad’s native format. The site says projects can be checked against electrical, layout and fabrication rules, then exported as Gerbers, STEP files and editable CAD. Those files are meant to remain portable: the company says users can take them to any fabricator or use them in another tool. Its published plans range from $20 to $500 a month, with the higher tiers including more AI work and support for more projects.
The workflow makes a larger promise than generating a plausible-looking circuit board. Hardware design crosses electrical schematics, component libraries, printed circuit layouts and mechanical enclosures. A board can look finished on screen and still fail because a component is unavailable, a footprint is wrong, or a case does not fit. HeyPCB’s site says its checks use real parts and fabrication rules; that is a company description of the product, not independent evidence that AI-generated designs are ready to manufacture without engineering review.
The company’s own terms of service say AI outputs may be incomplete, incorrect, non-manufacturable or unsafe, and assign users responsibility for reviewing and testing designs before fabrication or deployment. That warning is central to the product’s credibility. Reusing a board can save time only if a builder can understand its decisions, confirm its license and verify that the altered design still works.
Circuit World therefore has two jobs. It needs to make open designs easier to discover and reuse, and it needs to show that the AI workspace can help users make reliable changes rather than merely generate CAD files. The launch announcement touts the size of the library, but that count says nothing by itself about how many designs are complete, actively maintained or successfully built. HeyPCB is betting that a searchable, forkable catalog will make hardware feel more collaborative. Its own engineering checks will have to earn trust one board at a time.