Software · microsoldering
Microsoldering software that reasons before it reworks.
Microsoldering doesn't start at the iron or the hot-air station: it starts at the diagnosis. WrenchBoard puts the boardview, the schematic, the measurement log and an AI agent that thinks like a senior tech on one screen, so the only component you heat is the right one.
Try it on your own board01The bench
What software should bring to a microsoldering bench
Screen and battery swaps don’t need software. It’s at component level (shorted power rails, missing voltages, failing BGAs, corrosion after liquid damage) that tooling makes the difference between a one-hour repair and a board that sits on the shelf for three weeks.
Good microsoldering software has four concrete jobs:
- Read the board’s documentation: boardviews in mutually incompatible formats, PDF schematics hundreds of pages long, and the cross-references between the two.
- Locate physically: go from a refdes (
U7,R49,F1) to its real position on the top or bottom side, with the nets that reach it. - Structure the diagnosis: turn a symptom (“board dead, no LED”) into an ordered sequence of measurements instead of probing at random.
- Accumulate: what you found on one board should serve the next one.
WrenchBoard is built around those four jobs, with one distinctive feature: an AI agent is wired into every one of them.
02Reading
Reading the board: boardview and schematics in one tool
WrenchBoard ships a boardview viewer that opens fourteen formats natively, from KiCad .kicad_pcb to the historical .brd, plus .fz, .cad, .bdv, .asc, .tvw and the XZZ-encrypted .pcb. The board renders in an interactive canvas: refdes search, net highlighting, top/bottom flip, component-type filtering, on desktop and touch alike. One format earns a special mention: the XZZ .pcb export carries the factory’s own test values, the expected resistance and voltage on each net, so the agent can compare your reading against what the board is supposed to show.
On the schematic side, the ingestion pipeline turns a PDF into an electrical graph: every page goes through a vision model (Claude), components and connections are extracted, merged, classified into power, logic and connector edges, then compiled with an inferred boot sequence. The output is not an annotated image. It’s a queryable data structure you can run “what happens if F1 is open?” against.
03The protocol
From symptom to measurement protocol
The heart of the workflow: you describe the symptom in plain language, the diagnostic agent cross-checks the device’s known failure rules against the electrical graph, and proposes a probability-ranked hypothesis, then a step-by-step measurement protocol: continuity across the input fuse, voltage at this test point, diode-mode reading on that rail.
Every measurement you report lands in the repair journal and tightens the hypothesis. The agent doesn’t describe the board. It drives it. When it asks you to probe R49, the boardview zooms in, highlights the part and dims everything else.
For structuring fault-finding on power trees specifically, see the motherboard diagnostics page, which details the fault-tree method the agent applies.
04No invention
Anti-hallucination: the constraint that changes everything
A language model left free with its answers will eventually invent a capacitor. WrenchBoard enforces the opposite: every component reference the agent cites is validated against the actually parsed board. An unknown refdes is flagged, never asserted. Failure rules come from a per-device knowledge base, built offline and audited, not from the model’s memory.
That’s the difference between asking a general-purpose chatbot for advice and working with a trade tool: the first will always answer something; the second only cites what it can prove on your board.
05Memory
Accumulating: memory across repairs
Every session leaves a structured trace: measurements, confirmed cause, narrative summary. Recurring failure patterns and diagnostic playbooks are shared across devices read-only; the active repair’s notebook is read-write. When a similar board comes back, the agent re-reads what already worked, like the senior colleague you’d ask “have you seen this fault before?”.
06The shop
Donor stock, microscope, and a touch-driven bench
Three more surfaces the agent reaches into. Donor stock: declare your dead boards as donors and WrenchBoard indexes their harvestable parts, so when a repair needs a replacement the agent searches your own pile by electrical signature (type, value, package, MPN) before you order anything. Microscope capture: it can pull a still frame from your USB microscope or webcam mid-session to look at what you’re seeing. And the boardview is fully touch-driven on phone and tablet, with pinch-zoom, pan and tap-select, so the diagnostic screen works on the same device you keep next to the hot-air station.
07Hosting
In the browser, or on your own metal
WrenchBoard runs in the browser with no install and a free plan to get started on covered devices. The diagnostic engine is source-available: a shop that wants to keep schematics and history local can self-host it for its own bench. The project took 2nd place at Anthropic’s “Built with Opus 4.7” hackathon in April 2026, and the code is on GitHub.
Watch it work
The same agent, on a real board
This is not a mockup, it is the bench itself with its own interface, running on the MNT Reform pack exported from the engine: 487 real components and 2066 real pads. Every step below is what the engine answers on this board, from the device's rules for the symptom to the schematic graph behind the input fuse F1 and the board net it feeds. Here is what the agent does with a board that will not power up.
Eight tool calls, each one a real answer from the engine on this board, and not one component named from memory.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Is WrenchBoard free?
Yes, there's a free plan with no card required: open the app in the browser, pick a device covered by the knowledge base and start a diagnostic session. The Pro plan unlocks knowledge-base enrichment and ingestion of your own schematics. The engine is also source-available and self-hostable.
Do I need to install anything?
No. WrenchBoard runs entirely in the browser at app.wrenchboard.cloud. If you'd rather keep your data on your own bench machine, the engine self-hosts from the public GitHub repository.
Does the software replace my multimeter or bench supply?
No, and it doesn't try to. WrenchBoard organizes the reasoning: it proposes step-by-step measurement protocols (continuity, voltage, diode mode), you take the readings at the bench, and it interprets the results to narrow the hypothesis.
Which boards are covered?
Any board you have a boardview for (14 formats parsed natively) or a PDF schematic of. The knowledge base covers a continuously growing device catalogue, and every confirmed diagnosis enriches it.
How is this different from a plain boardview viewer?
A viewer displays the board; WrenchBoard understands it. The electrical graph compiled from the schematic lets the agent simulate failure cascades, rank the most probable culprit, and drive the boardview while it walks you through the measurements.
Get started
Try Wrench Board free, in your browser.
Free plan, no card required. Open the app, pick a covered device, and start a diagnostic session with the agent.