A new TrailCurrent repository went public today. It is called TrailCurrentClaudeSkills, and it is the collection of little instruction notes we hand to our AI helper when we are building TrailCurrent. The first one in the box is the EEZ Studio note that goes with this week's video. More will follow.
You can find it here: github.com/trailcurrentoss/TrailCurrentClaudeSkills.
What is an AI helper, and what is a skill?
The AI helper we use is called Claude. It is a program from a company called Anthropic that you can chat with, ask questions of, and ask to do work alongside you. If you have ever used ChatGPT, it is the same idea. We use Claude all day long in TrailCurrent's workshop. We ask it to read code, draft documentation, generate diagrams, look up datasheets, and a hundred other small jobs that would otherwise eat the afternoon.
A skill is just a sheet of instructions we write for Claude in advance. Think of it as a recipe card pinned to the wall of the workshop. When a certain kind of job comes in, the helper grabs the card and reads it first. The card says things like, "if someone asks for one of these, here is the safe way to do it, here is the order to do it in, here is the part that always gets people in trouble."
Without the cards, the helper figures everything out from scratch each time. With the cards, it does not. The afternoon stays.
Why we are publishing them
TrailCurrent has three goals it sets for itself. Build the system. Give it away. Teach others how to do the same thing with their own ideas. The hardware is open. The firmware is open. The wiring diagrams are open. The CAN library is open. It would be a strange thing to keep the workshop notes locked in a drawer.
So they are not in a drawer. They are on GitHub, under the MIT license, free to copy and use in your own projects. If you are building a hardware product and you use Claude alongside your work, the same notes that save us an afternoon can save you one too.
The first card: EEZ Studio
The first skill in the repository is for EEZ Studio, the free visual designer that this week's video is a tour of. It is the program we use to draw the screens that ship on Milepost and Fireside, and it stays the source of truth for every interface we publish.
Here is how the new skill actually fits in. When we start designing a new HMI, short for Human Machine Interface and the technical name for the touchscreen face of a product, we begin by mocking up the look in Claude Design. Tile layout, button shapes, color palette, font choices, the general feel. Once the concept is right, we hand the mockup and the skill over to Claude Code, the version of the helper that can read and write files directly on the workstation. Claude reads the mockup, picks up the instructions in the skill, and builds the bulk of the interface inside the EEZ Studio project, screen by screen. The first draft of a working UI shows up in a fraction of the time it would take to place every widget by hand.
From that point on, the project opens in EEZ Studio the same way any project does. The screens are right there on the canvas. Every button, slider, and label is a real EEZ Studio object that can be selected, dragged, recolored, or renamed in the editor. A person nudges a label into pixel alignment, swaps a color, adds an extra screen by hand if that is faster, or hands the project back to Claude Code to stamp out another batch of screens that match the ones already in place. The editor is the home. The skill is the part that lets the helper drop the first draft of a new UI into it.
For a sense of pace, the HMI shown in this week's video, the entire touchscreen face of the FluidNC pendant, was built with this exact workflow in one day. Concept in Claude Design in the morning. First draft in EEZ Studio by the afternoon. The rest of the day was polish in the editor.
If you use EEZ Studio for your own touchscreen project, this is the card to copy onto your wall. The editor stays exactly where it always was. EEZ Studio remains the source of truth, you can always see your screens on its canvas, and you can keep working on them with the easy tools the program was built around.
More cards are coming
EEZ Studio is the first one out the door because it goes with the video. It is not the only one we use. There are notes for the program that designs our circuit boards, notes for the program that draws our 3D printed enclosures, notes for the program that turns a CAD drawing of a part into a clean catalog-style photograph for the website, and a handful of others. We will copy them into the public repository as each one is cleaned up and ready for someone else to read.
The pattern is the same in every case. The program at the center of the card is the star. The card is just the bit that lets Claude join in when there is a useful seat at the table.
How to use a skill
If you already use Claude Code, the official program from Anthropic that lets the helper read and write files on your own computer, copying a skill into place is a one-line job:
cp -r eezstudio ~/.claude/skills/Claude Code picks it up automatically the next time you start a session, and uses it whenever a task lines up with what the card describes. There is a longer explanation in the repository's README and in Anthropic's documentation.
If you do not use Claude, the cards are still readable. They are written in plain English, with the technical bits explained. Anyone learning EEZ Studio for the first time can read the EEZ Studio skill as a survival guide and skip past the painful parts we already discovered the hard way.
Why this matters if you are building a TrailCurrent
If you have landed here because you are thinking about putting a TrailCurrent system in your own rig, here is what this repository says about the kind of project we are. The shop floor is not a secret. The tools we use are not proprietary. The notes we hand to our own helpers are right there next to the code and the wiring diagrams. If you decide a year from now that you want to design a new module of your own, or change one of ours, the whole working environment we use to build TrailCurrent is yours to copy.
That is the contract. Open hardware, open firmware, open documentation, open workshop. The repository is at trailcurrentoss/TrailCurrentClaudeSkills. Star it if you want a heads up when the next card lands.
If you build something with one of the skills, or you spot a way to make one better, please open an issue or a pull request on the repository, or drop us a note on Discord. The whole point of writing the lesson down is so other people get to use it.