6 ms·
"Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"
- ironbound 9mo agoGood metaphor for 2026.. The system is on fire
- moffkalast 9mo agoIf you know Ben Eater, you know he built that circuit on purpose lol.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- empressplay 9mo agoMCP Server for KiCAD: https://github.com/mixelpixx/KiCAD-MCP-Server https://github.com/mixelpixx/KiCAD-MCP-Server
- Liftyee 9mo agoIn the real world where parts have costs and mistakes have consequences, the GenAI "YOLO" mode doesn't work as well.
- JKCalhoun 9mo agoWhy, yes I am. I know Ben is having some fun, perhaps making a valid point, with the burning component on the breadboard. I think it does underscore a difference between software vibing and hardware vibing—crash vs. fire. But in fact vibe-breadboarding has drawn me deeper into the electronics hobby. I have learned more about op-amps and analog computing in the past two months in large part thanks to Gemini and ChatGPT pointing the way. I know now about BAT54S Schottky diodes and how they can protect ADC inputs. I have found better ADC chips than the ones that come pre-soldered on most EDP32 dev boards (and have breadboarded them up with success). These were often problems I didn't know I should solve. (Problems that, for example, YouTube tutorials will disregard because they're demonstrating a constrained environment and are trying to keep it simple for beginners, I suppose.) To be sure I research what the LLMs propose, but now have the language and a better picture in my mind to know what to search for (how do I protect ADC inputs from over or under voltages?). (Hilariously too, I often end up on the EE Stack Exchange where there is often anything but a concise answer.) 5V USB power, through-hole op-amp chips… I'm not too worried about burning my house down.
- __MatrixMan__ 9mo agoKnow the risks, prepare for them, get a little burned now and then, have fun... sounds like a recipe for learning to me.
- JKCalhoun 9mo agoSometimes sarcasm is so subtle… Irrespective, "letting the magic smoke out" has been a part of the electronic hobbyist's vernacular long before vibe-breadboarding. (Been there many times.)
- nospice 9mo agoBoth Gemini and ChatGPT have a pretty comically wrong knowledge of op-amps. They usually recommend outdated chips and are confused about circuit topologies. I was looking at this last week and it hasn't changed. I asked them to suggest and evaluate microphone circuits and they were just bad. I would really, really recommend reading some human-written text if you're learning about that. I can't think of any reason why you'd want to use Schottky diodes to protect op-amp inputs. They have high leakage currents and poor surge capabilities. Most op-amps have internal protection diodes, and if you need some extra ESD or overvoltage protection, a Schottky diode probably isn't the way. I'm not taking an anti-LLM view here. I think they are useful in some fields and are getting better. But in this particular instance, there's a breadth of excellent learning resources and the one you've chosen isn't good.
- JKCalhoun 9mo agoThanks, I have read a lot of human-written text (and actual books from the day) in addition to the LLM feedback. Again though, had I ignored LLMs altogether I would have barely progressed in the past two months. I think. They seem to act as an "idea board" of sorts—sends me out then looking for others to validate (or not) what they're spouting. "Schottky diodes to protect op-amp inputs…" Not op-amp inputs, ADC inputs (which may well come from an op-amp output though—I am playing with analog computing after all).
- 9mo ago
- 1970-01-01 9mo agoThis brings up a much larger discussion. How bad are LLMs at engineering? Would you trust one to build a high voltage circuit? How about a bridge?
- bradfa 9mo agoI don't trust an LLM to write software for me without human verification, but it's not like it's that hard to verify what it writes if you understand how to write code yourself. I expect even when an LLM can layout a high voltage circuit or design a bridge that most organizations who carry liability would still be sure to audit the design with a set or two of intelligent and trained human eyes.
- fenwick67 9mo agoThe trick is, LLMs are only as good as they are at writing code because of all the publicly available source code, tutorials, blog posts and Q&A it can slurp up.
- mikeayles 9mo agoBeen working on this exact problem for a while now. The core issue isn't that LLMs are bad at circuits, it's that we're asking them to do novel design when they should be doing selection and integration. My project (https://phaestus.app/blog https://phaestus.app/blog) takes a different approach: pre-validated circuit blocks on a fixed 12.7mm grid with standardized bus structures. The LLM picks which blocks you need and where they go, but the actual circuit design was done by humans and tested. No hallucinated resistor values, no creative interpretations of datasheets. It's the same insight that made software dependencies work. You don't ask ChatGPT to write you a JSON parser from scratch, you ask it which library to use. Hardware should work the same way. Still WIP and the block library needs expanding, but the constraint-based approach means outputs are manufacturable by construction rather than "probably fine, let's see what catches fire."
- jacquesm 9mo agoThis sounds very interesting, especially if you combine it for instance with an FPGA for logic blocks.
- mikeayles 9mo agoThanks, as a concept it has potential, I've leveraged some of my previous projects www.circuitsnips.com for inspiration for the subcircuit blocks, TOKN for more accurate parsing of schematics, and to a lesser extent even my datasheet MCP server and kicad-netlist tool, more info at https://www.mikeayles.com/ https://www.mikeayles.com/ For the time being, I'm erring away from feature creep, even though I really, really want to though! For the sorts of products I would like this to make for the time being, simple I2C, SPI and GPIO driven peripherals are the limit. I only have 2 more weeks, and then I want to have a working, battery powered device on my desk. PCB, Enclosure, Firmware, everything. Similarly, I haven't got a framework for anything mechatronic in the MCAD pipeline, so no moving parts (besides clickable buttons). Fixed devices are fine, like screens and connectors though.
- jacquesm 9mo agoIs there a way to stay up to date with what you are doing? It very much aligns with how I've approached hardware since I was 15 and had a massive stack of functional blocks of electronics circuitry that I would combine in all kinds of ways. I've lost the 3x5's, but I still work that way, build a simple block, test it, build another block, test that, hook the one to the other etc.
- bob1029 9mo agoWhat would stop us from using something like LTspice to validate the circuit before risking physical components? This seems ~identical to the situation where we can use a compiler or parser to return syntax errors to the agent in a feedback loop. I don't know exactly what the tool calling surface would look like, but I feel like this could work.
- blovescoffee 9mo agoI'm working on this. It works pretty well. The main issue I'm working out right now (which has proven very difficult) is the auto-placing and auto-routing on a multi-layer pcb.
- benbojangles 9mo agoyes. but it is not smooth sailing.
- bradfa 9mo agoIf you know what you're doing with electronics design, I've found that leveraging an LLM to help come up with ideas, layout block diagrams, and find parts can be super useful. Integrating Digi-Key or Mouser API support for finding parts pricing and inventory is also super handy. Using the distributor APIs can also allow you to perform natural language search which isn't possible (or isn't easy) through the distributor websites as the LLM can quickly download the datasheet and read it as part of its searching operation to verify if a part should be considered given your requirements.
- burnt-resistor 9mo agoI think the problem with LLMs is they fail to adhere to implicit or explicit constraints. Parts finding functionality of DigiKey is pretty darn good, but it would be awesome to find if there are cheaper equivalent circuits that are functionally equivalent to a particular block, yet again under aforementioned constraints. Multi-component simplification would be awesome so as long as it's safe. AI, so far, is not yet a substitute for review by an expert human.
- swaits 9mo agoProbably works pretty well with atopile. Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44542880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44542880
- deckar01 9mo agoI have been working on a tool that aids in circuit tuning: model circuit equations as python functions, the solution space is discrete component values, auto solve for a target spec, build the circuits, record measurements, fit error, repeat until the experiment matches predictions. It adjusts nearly every parameter between tests and converges surprisingly fast. (25% to 2% error in 3 tests for an active band pass filter) The MVP was hand coded, leaned heavily on sympy, linear fits, and worked for simple circuits. The current PoC only falls back to sympy to invert equations, switches to GPR when convergence stalls, and use a robust differential evolution from scipy for combinatorial search. The MVP works, but now I have a mountain of slop to cleanup and some statistics homework to understand the limitations of these algorithms. It’s nice to validate ideas so quickly though.
- nebben64 9mo agoSemi related: what are your guys workflow to PCB design? I need to build an AFE + BLE MCU for a BCI, and having no EE background, my workflow is KiCAD -> buy components -> breadboard testing -> done?? -> order fully manufactured PCB? I know nothing...
- jacquesm 9mo agoHire someone competent?
- dcrazy 9mo agoAs an AI skeptic, I’ve been brought around to using Claude Code to understand a codebase, like when I need to quickly find where something happens through a tower of abstractions. Crucially, this relies on Claude actually searching my codebase using grep. It’s effectively automated guess and check. I wonder if a SPICE skill would make LLMs safer and more useful in this area. I’m a complete EE newbie, and I am slowly working through The Art of Electronics to learn more. Being able to feed the LLM a circuit diagram—or better yet, a photo of a real circuit!—and have it guess at what it does and then simulate the results to check its work could be a great boon to hands-on learning.
- PunchyHamster 9mo agoWell, using LLM as search on steroids do have big advantage that hallucinations are easy to spot and don't matter
- DoctorOetker 9mo agoproblem is that even SPICE has poor default models for transformers etc...
- jacquesm 9mo agoI wonder how many shots he made to get this perfect one.
- avsteele 9mo agoI haven't had much success yet with this. My ratings follow. Reading and interpreting datasheets: A- (this has gotten a LOT better in the last year) Give netlist to LLM and ask it to check for errors: C (hit or miss, but useful because catching ANY errors helps) Give Image to LLM and ask it to check for errors: C (hit or miss) Design of circuit from description: D- (hallucinates parts, suggests parts for wrong purpose. suggests obsolete parts. Cannot make diagrams. Not an F because its textual descriptions have gotten better. When describing what nodes connect to each other now its not always wrong. You will have to re-check EVERYTHING though, so its usefulness is doubtful)
- st_goliath 9mo ago> Thought for 37s > ... > Ah - that makes sense, that's why it's on fire oh how very relatable, I've had similar moments. I knew about SEDs (smoke emitting diodes) and LERs (light emitting resistors), but what do you call the inductor version?
- UncleEntity 9mo agoWould that be Rapidly Decompressing Capacitors? ...only know what an inductor is from watching a video one the youtubes where they were talking about using them on the suspensions of F1 cars and they explained their relationship to electronic circuits, forget what their actual name is.
- exe34 9mo agoThis reminds me of the video: "Who did your electricals?" "My nephew Thomas!" "Oh, so when did his house burn down?" "Last ye.... wait how do you know his house burnt down?"
- schlauerfox 9mo agoSmoke Emitting Choke?
- PunchyHamster 9mo agoAh, the elusive light emitting inductor
- burnt-resistor 9mo agoIt can emit light once and act as a fuse.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- dvh 9mo agoNot LLM, just good old Monte Carlo. I made pedalgen [1] some time ago, it generate random guitar pedals, check the Results section. [1] https://github.com/dvhx/pedalgen https://github.com/dvhx/pedalgen
- belval 9mo agoNot quite the same thing, but recently I want to make adapter clips for connecting powerblocks to a barbell, making them suitable as weights for deadlift/benching. I have fusion 360 experience so I designed something to 3D print as usual, but the issue was that PLA even at 100% infill is pretty unsafe when holding 90lbs blocks. The logical next step is to use metal, but that's outside of my hobby tools. I found that JLCPCB offered sheet metal fabrication but I had no experience with sheet metal designs. I went to ChatGPT and was actually really impressed by how well it was able to guide me from design to final model file. I received the adapters last week and was really impressed by how nice they turned out. All of that to say, AI-assisted design is actually lowering the bar of entry for a whole lot of problems and I am quite happy about it.
- K0balt 9mo agoIf you have solid domain knowledge, LLMs are a force multiplier for electronic design. You just have to have a spider sense for “this is going off the rails”. Other than that, it does useful circuit review, part selection (or suggestions for alternative parts you didn’t know existed), and is usually usefully skeptical. It’s also great at quick back of the napkin “can I just use a smt ceramic here?” Type calculations, especially handy for roughing out timings and that kind of thing.
- 8note 9mo agoim imagining if you had a couple parts picked, an llm could follow the reference designs quite well and pick relevant parts and lay them out. maybe not in the best way, but from a post here last week or so, somebody has written an altium mcp, from which i assume a bunch of the timing and capacitor checks could be run. maybe not anything particularly high tech, but enough to let mechanical engineers put together test boards without needing to get too far into the electrical discipline
- boznz 9mo agoThis. LLM's are still not good enough to trust for Vibe-Circuit building - a circuit re-design is a lot more cost and time than a code change - But they can get you over so many hurdles getting you to the right references in forums and datasheets quickly, I suspect it wont be too long before they can make schematics and PCB's that are 90% there, but currently much more useful in the firmware design. I am now more of a hobbyist than a professional and LLM's allow me to get results quicker, for example over Christmas I replaced my Pioneer stereo with a new custom motherboard, re-using the class AB analog parts and all the switches and the VFD Display. LLM helped me do it a lot quicker and gave me a couple of novel options, write up here => https://rodyne.com/?p=3380 https://rodyne.com/?p=3380
- greenflux 9mo agoI've been using Claude Code to ssh into a Raspberry Pi in a subprocess, so I can chat with the AI from my more powerful machine, and let it write and run the code on the Pi. It's also good for writing scripts and uploading them to an ESP-32 with the Arduino CLI.
- mikewarot 9mo agoI've been vibe circuit building since the 1970s, but that's not what this is about, is it? ;-) Years ago, at Pumping Station One in Chicago, I watched someone struggle with the driving of multiple LEDs from an Arduino in his project. He wondered why the LEDs got dimmer when more than one was lit. I looked at the original schematic, and what he had built, and noticed a difference. The original design had a resistor on each LED, but he had decided that was a redundancy and refactored it to use a single LED instead. In the case of current flow, this meant the circuit still worked, but that current limiting that resistor provided now was shared across every active LED, leading to the progressive dimming as more LEDs were active. It turned out his background was in software, where the assumptions are much different as to what is important. Cutting out redundant code is an important skill. I saw it as a cognitive impedance mismatch being played out in real life. I assume the same is true for an LLM/AI attempting the same leap.
- peteforde 9mo agoI actually had this exact scenario come up last week except that in my version it warned me to make sure that I added a resistor to each LED to keep brightness normalized. I didn't happen to need this particular advice, but it stuck in my head as something that would potentially save someone learning a lot of pain.
- quadrature 9mo agoHad this same experience back when I first learned to program a PIC microcontroller. You really shouldn't be driving LEDs directly off IO pins anyways. I think the digitalness of IO pins also lends itself to not thinking about the underlying circuitry and coming at it from a software lens.
- em3rgent0rdr 9mo agoIt depends. Many modern microcontrollers are perfectly fine driving LEDs directly off IO pins if the pin specs say it is rated for sufficient current (like 20mA). However, older ones like ESP8266 can only do like 2mA and the 8051 even less. Or you run into a total power budget issue if your are running too many pins. Also, some IO pins are perfectly fine at sinking current to ground but aren't suited for sourcing current, in which case the LED would be directly connected to an external high voltage and the IO pin would simply be switching to ground or not.
- gaigalas 9mo agoWe'll eventually have a discarded vibe coded silicon wafer batch. Someone will be insane enough to spend on it.
- michaeljx 9mo agoI ve modified my ZigBee bathroom led light. Replaced the daughterboard with an esp32, integrated a humidity sensor and a presence sensor, another rely and a power circuit, and I now have a bathroom light that lights up automatically when someone is in the room, and turns on the extractor only if the humidity is a ove a certain level. I ve done all this by taking photos of the circuits and asking Gemini how to do it.
- micheljansen 9mo agoIf you don't know Ben Eater, check out his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/beneater https://www.youtube.com/beneater WARNING: nerd snipe material.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Mihai_ 9mo agoCheck out https://silixon.io/ https://silixon.io/ Have used them and they’re pretty legit. Early on but have potential
- magrietdennis 9mo ago[dead]
- cadamsdotcom 9mo agoI see some commenters saying “if you are an expert, the model is a productivity multiplier” What is being said here is “I can give my model a high quality feedback loop”. With good simulators and good access to info about latest products etc a novice can also give their model a high quality feedback loop! But they have to build it or source it from somewhere. I’m talking all the right tools to give the model a goal and let it rip. Once that loop is built the human is out of the loop and the model has the grounding it needs to converge on a solution instead of needing constant prodding. There’s immense opportunity for experts to create these grounding tools and productise them.
- briHass 9mo agoIf you want a laugh, ask the LLM to draw the schematic of a basic circuit (like towards the end of a Forrest Mims III book.) I've been 50/50 with vibe circuits recently. Gemini 2.5 gave me some really wrong designs of an advanced crowbar circuit I was playing with, but recently 3.0 Fast gave me excellent advice on an adjustable load with a hodgepodge of parts.