Abstract This paper examines how custom computing hardware for fast power system analysis may be adapted to improve the user experience as well as its commercial-viability. One prime example of such custom hardware is the FPAA-based analog emulator developed previously by the authors. The authors propose development of a USB-based actuation and data acquisition interface that allows analog computational tools to work seamlessly with one or more commercially-available power system analysis software packages. A commercially-available software application will be tasked with user interaction and post-processing, while custom hardware is tasked with faster-than real-time power system analysis.