An MCP server that puts the test equipment on my bench within reach of an agentic harness. Point Claude Code or Codex at it, ask it to go investigate a circuit, and it will.
Four instruments: an arbitrary waveform generator, a multimeter, an oscilloscope, and a power supply. They all speak SCPI, a text protocol standardized in 1990, which turns out to be perfect for this. Instruments that already accept commands as strings do not need much of an adapter to accept them from a model.
That comes to 76 typed tools, plus a raw passthrough for everything they do not cover, because no wrapper is going to span the full command set of four instruments and pretending otherwise only produces a worse manual.
The scope can hand back screenshots, and that matters more than it sounds. Plenty of what an oscilloscope tells you is not a number, it is a shape. A model that can look at the trace gets to reason about it the way you would, rather than working from whatever measurements somebody thought to ask for in advance.
What it is good for runs wider than I expected. At one end, setting a specific trigger, which saves me a menu dive. At the other, handing over a circuit that is misbehaving and letting it drive all four instruments to work out why.
It is the closest thing I have to a lab assistant. One that has read every datasheet and does not mind being asked to do the tedious part again.
Worth saying plainly if you go and run it: raw SCPI has no authentication of any kind, and these tools will happily set a power supply’s voltage and switch its output on. It is driving real hardware with real things wired to it.