PCB manufacturing releases still feel surprisingly manual.
In software, we expect automated tests, CI pipelines, policy gates, signed artifacts, provenance, and reproducible releases.
But hardware releases often still end with:
Export Gerbers → manually check files → create a ZIP → send it to the manufacturer → hope nothing was missed.
I built BoardReadyOps to explore a different approach.
BoardReadyOps is an open-source hardware release pipeline for KiCad projects.
Its core workflow is:
Generate → Validate → Decide → Package → Attest → Review → Handoff
Instead of treating manufacturing outputs as a collection of files, BoardReadyOps treats a PCB manufacturing handoff as an engineering release.
What it does
BoardReadyOps can:
- Generate manufacturing artifacts through KiCad CLI
- Validate BOM, CPL, Gerbers, drill files, project metadata, and release rules
- Produce explicit PASS / WARN / FAIL release decisions
- Generate JSON, SARIF, Markdown, HTML, and JUnit reports
- Run locally as a CLI or inside GitHub Actions
- Create manufacturer-oriented handoff packages
- Produce checksums, SBOM, provenance, and release evidence
- Emit machine-readable remediation plans for automation and coding agents
The goal is not only to answer:
“Does this PCB have errors?”
The more important question is:
“Do we have enough verified evidence to release this hardware for manufacturing?”
Why I think this matters
Software teams have developed mature release engineering practices because deployments need to be repeatable, auditable, and safe.
Hardware has an even stronger reason for that discipline.
A software defect can often be fixed with another deployment.
A hardware release problem may already exist in hundreds or thousands of manufactured boards before it is discovered.
That makes the transition between design and manufacturing especially important.
BoardReadyOps is an attempt to bring concepts such as CI/CD, policy enforcement, provenance, release evidence, and automated quality gates into that part of the hardware lifecycle.
Open source
The project is open source and available here:
https://github.com/oaslananka/boardreadyops
I would especially appreciate feedback from people working with:
KiCad, PCB design, electronics manufacturing, hardware CI/CD, release engineering, EDA tooling, or supply-chain automation.
I'm particularly interested in one question:
What is still the most manual or error-prone part of your PCB release process?
