Ask your own model about any page
Highlight a passage you are stuck on, click Copy reference, and paste it into your prompt. The Chipbase tutor is a small MCP (Model Context Protocol) server you run yourself: it looks up the page you were reading, finds the passage, and hands your model the section around it and the site's own definitions, so the explanation starts from exactly what you were reading. It uses whichever model you already use, and nothing here runs a model or needs an account.
Download and unpack
The download is a zip of the server's source. Unpack it anywhere.
unzip chipbase-tutor-0.1.1.zip cd chipbase-tutor
Install it
Into its own virtual environment, so it touches nothing else on your machine.
python3 -m venv .venv .venv/bin/pip install .
On Windows the second line is .venv\Scripts\pip install .
Add it to your model
Register it with the client you already use. The commands are filled in
for this site, https://samcooper01.github.io/chipbase; run them from inside the
chipbase-tutor folder.
claude mcp add chipbase-tutor -e CHIPBASE_URL=https://samcooper01.github.io/chipbase -- "$PWD/.venv/bin/chipbase-tutor"
Add this to claude_desktop_config.json, with the full path to the folder you unpacked, then restart the app.
{
"mcpServers": {
"chipbase-tutor": {
"command": "/full/path/to/chipbase-tutor/.venv/bin/chipbase-tutor",
"env": { "CHIPBASE_URL": "https://samcooper01.github.io/chipbase" }
}
}
}
Any client that speaks MCP can run it: the command is
.venv/bin/chipbase-tutor, the transport is standard input
and output, and the one setting is the environment variable
CHIPBASE_URL=https://samcooper01.github.io/chipbase.
Use it
On any page, highlight what you do not understand. A Copy reference button appears under it. Paste the result into your prompt and ask your question. A reference looks like this:
> "Static timing analysis is how the flow proves that a synchronous design meets its clock" > (Chipbase: Static Timing Analysis > What static timing analysis is, https://samcooper01.github.io/chipbase/education/static-timing-analysis) what does "proves" mean here if nothing is simulated?
Try the button now: highlight any sentence on this page and a Copy reference button appears under it.
What your model gets
resolve_referenceThe section around the quoted passage, the paragraphs either side, the page outline, and the glossary definitions of the terms in it. The quote still resolves after small edits to the page.
read_section and page_outlineAnother section of the same page by its heading, or the page's headings in order, for follow-up questions.
defineThe Chipbase glossary entry for a term or acronym, so the explanation uses the same meaning the site does.
explain promptGive it a copied reference and it asks for an explanation in the page's own terms, with a small worked case, ending with one question that checks you have it.