Introduction to Allspice Automations
Allspice Automations helps hardware teams automate design checks and workflows that are often done manually or inconsistently.
Automations bring CI style automation to hardware development, allowing teams to validate designs, generate artifacts, and enforce review standards automatically as designs change.
This makes design reviews more consistent, reduces late stage surprises, and gives teams better visibility into their hardware development process.
What problems Automations solve
Hardware teams often rely on:
- Manual checks during design reviews
- Tribal knowledge for validation steps
- Spreadsheets and scripts for BOMs and cost tracking
- Inconsistent enforcement of review standards
Allspice Automations helps replace these manual steps with repeatable, automated workflows.
What are Allspice Automations?
Allspice Automations are automated jobs that run against your hardware designs when changes occur.
Automations can:
- Validate design rules and constraints
- Generate bills of materials automatically
- Track cost and component changes over time
- Enforce team specific review requirements
- Run custom scripts and checks as part of your workflow
Once configured, Automations run automatically every time your design changes.
.png)
CI for hardware teams
In software, Continuous Integration means validating changes early and often.
For hardware teams, this means:
- Catching issues before designs are released
- Reducing back and forth during reviews
- Ensuring every design follows the same rules
- Maintaining traceability across revisions
Automations apply these principles to schematics, PCB layouts, and design data.
When should you use Automations?
Automations are most useful once your team is managing designs in repositories and running regular design reviews.
Common scenarios include:
- Teams scaling beyond a few engineers
- Designs with recurring validation requirements
- Organizations that need auditability and consistency
- Hardware programs with frequent revisions
Automations complement manual reviews and AI assisted reviews rather than replacing them.
Automations, DRCY, and manual review
Allspice supports multiple layers of review:
- Manual review for engineering judgment and discussion
- DRCY for AI assisted analysis of schematics and datasheets
- Automations for deterministic, rule based automation
Many teams use all three together to improve coverage without slowing development.
Next steps
To start using Automations, continue to:
Getting started with Allspice Automations
This guide walks through:
- Enabling Automations
- Running your first automated check
- Understanding Automation results in design reviews