7 ms·

Guy builds AI driven hardware hacker arm from duct tape, old cam and CNC machine

225 points by scaredpelican 6mo ago

scaredpelican 6mo ago
How does this only have a single star. This is genuinely mind blowing.
- rolph 6mo ago
  first release 18hrs ago...
sanieldoe 6mo ago
This is amazing! Limitation breeds creativity indeed
nullc 6mo ago
Maybe put the probe on a spring loaded linear sensor, and move down until it hits a target offset (could just be read by a simple flag in an optical sensor)-- resulting in hitting a constant target force.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
Havoc 6mo ago
Can't say I fully understand it but this certainly smells like someone is getting hired off a single github repo as CV
- ghurtado 6mo ago
  Nowadays the former seems to be a requirement for the latter, so I'm inclined to agree with you
- DaiPlusPlus 6mo ago
  > someone is getting hired off a single github repo as CV Isn't that a good thing?
- Unsponsoredio 6mo ago
  not a bad strategy. one repo that shows you can duct tape commodity hardware together and let an agent handle the workflow beats 50 leetcode solutions on your profile. the interesting part is the cost ratio. commercial flying probe setups run 5 figures with proprietary software. this is a weekend build that gets you most of the way there for under 500 bucks.
deanputney 6mo ago
Wow that's nuts. What a great idea! I wonder how much of this the commercial flying probe machines can do already. Pretty cool to be able to have this on a home scale.
chromacity 6mo ago
It's both cool and a bit confusing. Is this an attempt to commoditize flying-probe testing for PCBs? An attempt to use LLMs to reverse-engineer circuits? Both? It almost feels like it would benefit from being split into two projects. If I'm testing my own PCBs, I probably don't want an agent in charge, at least not routinely. There's just no reason for the added cost, complexity, or non-determinism. And if I'm reversing someone else's design, then going through the effort of building an auto-prober seems like an overkill, especially since a single probe is seldom enough. Even the simplest serial interface will often have one line for clock and another for data, so you're gonna be manually making connections either way.
Animats 6mo ago
Interesting. Not clear what it really does. The hardware is an oscilloscope probe on a 3-axis CNC mechanism. That's called a "flying probe", and you can buy one.[1] Fine. But what does the AI do? It "ingests the project", but what does that mean? Finding all the pins? That's a start. Using a SPICE model to figure out what should be on each pin, and checking? Now that would be impressive. Probably something in between. The usual use for this sort of thing is that you probe a known-good board to find out what voltages and signals appear where, and then compare with newly manufactured boards. That's a common production check. There's potential here. If the AI has some concept of what the board under test is doing, and can diagnose problems, that's quite useful. [1] https://huntron.com/products/access2.htm https://huntron.com/products/access2.htm
- apimade 6mo ago
  From my understanding is you’d probe the board during different operations, process the results and deduct what signals are useful and traffic transmitting across the board (I.E private keys, what protocols are used, debug interfaces, firmware components, chip functions, etc).
- xyzzy123 6mo ago
  I think the novel idea here is you jam some hardware together (whatever you like) that can do "physical real world" things with a well understood interface and then spin up Claude with access to it. The way I'm thinking about it is, it's a _workflow_ innovation? So you ask for data sheets for all the visible chips and get PDFs in an output directory with minimal user interaction except to flip the board, ask for a basic idea of connectivity, get a stitched high res surface image etc.... which of course are all currently possible, but you can do them potentially with very low effort. There doesn't have to be a _software stack_ ahead of time. You ask Claude to do the thing, it will figure out how to do it, write some code, pull in some OSS and make the thing happen. You can take this project's software or leave it. You might say "tell me where you think the JTAG headers are" and it will come up with a workflow to do its best at that task (most likely with variable results...), but nonetheless this is not a thing you can ask of any commercial product I am aware of today. With probes, stuff can get interesting. Of course experienced hardware & reverse engineers already can do all this stuff and have a plethora of workflows for it but I still think it's an interesting POC of a generalisable approach. You can take or leave this particular software stack. Also, the hardware barely matters, you can duct tape whatever to whatever.
esbranson 6mo ago
> digitally guided fabrication > New York[1] [1] https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/keeping-new-yorkers-safe-governor-hochul-highlights-growing-support-nation-leading-proposals https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/keeping-new-yorkers-safe-go...
- gbgarbeb 6mo ago
  Kathy Hochul is cracking down on illegal flying probe machines.
uSoldering 6mo ago
It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting this to be real more than I do, but this is nowhere close to being ready to do actual work. Photographing real PCBs is hard, there is no fiducial maths, no actual probing is being done. It's just photos of a photo being piped into an agent. If it actually did what it claims, no reasonable person would exclude it from the demo video. https://gainsec.com/2026/04/16/autoprober/ https://gainsec.com/2026/04/16/autoprober/
- maininformer 6mo ago
  Could an agent no develop a bespoke correction algorithm for the photos of the photo?
  - uSoldering 6mo ago
    Why feed it photos of a photo when you could just feed it the photo that was printed out?
vatsachak 6mo ago
Same guy who made the Flock hacking tool
odie5533 6mo ago
Guy builds car from stick of gum, paperclip, and an old vehicle
- contingencies 6mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGyver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGyver
callumprentice 6mo ago
I figured this was some kind of home-grown prosthetic arm whose wearer could, using AI, draw any artwork online, speak ASL, perform minor surgery on themselves and so much more so long as their supply of tokens lasted. Perhaps a smidge disappointed when I had a look and discovered it wasn't that :)
claytonia 6mo ago
Cool demo, but letting an AI Agent drive a physical probe may have problems. AI is probabilistic, but hardware is precise. If the model miscalculates a pin's position by even 0.1mm, the probe may crush the board. I am curious how the author actually bridges the gap between the Agent’s 'guess' and the sub-millimeter precision needed to avoid damaging hardware?
- par1970 6mo ago
  I think this is roughly solved. Tell the agent to do all of its calculations in python.
  - delfinom 6mo ago
    ...OR if you are developing a PCB, you have the design data, and pick and place data and the gerber data. Any combination of such gives you positions of everything within micrometers. This is not a new problem. Testing of PCBs has been solved a billion times over and the world has had bed of nails tester and flying probe testers for 4 decades old. We have a 8 finger flying probe machine at our facility that literally all we do is load the board in, load in the design data. It identifies points of interests, learns the fiducials and we let it do a characterization run. We then have engineering review of the resulting data and just let it fly afterwards. None of this requires AI. But nowadays any linear regression qualifies as AI so imma go slap a label on it.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
- jstanley 6mo ago
  A spring-loaded probe would seem sufficient.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
NegativeLatency 6mo ago
Would be cool if you could use this (with 2 probes) to build a wiring net for reverse engineering.
shevy-java 6mo ago
I watched the linked in video: https://videos.files.wordpress.com/gD3kAWlO/autoprober-demo.mp4 https://videos.files.wordpress.com/gD3kAWlO/autoprober-demo.... But I am not sure what do I see there? Is that some 3D printing?
kuizu 6mo ago
A similar concept, but with multiple probes at the same time, was published in this blog series as open source hard- and software: https://www.schutzwerk.com/en/blog/proboter-01/ https://www.schutzwerk.com/en/blog/proboter-01/ They explain some of the use cases in this demo video https://youtu.be/TYEjZA-xbGo?is=osWXCrBkLOi4JHxO https://youtu.be/TYEjZA-xbGo?is=osWXCrBkLOi4JHxO
burgerone 6mo ago
Annoyingly misleading title unfortunately.
lrvick 6mo ago
This looks super useful, but I wish authors could stop doing these silly "source available" plays. Instead of donating to a project one has to buy GPU time to convert it to FOSS.
Jamesbeam 6mo ago
Finally i don’t need to press any buttons on my bionic arm any longer, the AI can find the pin on its own. What a glorious time to be alive. Claude really is going to bring pleasure to the people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgtO5sebA9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgtO5sebA9U
micromacrofoot 6mo ago
why not just take a photo with your phone and upload that to the llm
zombot 6mo ago
GitHub, that crappy POS, is down again. > Cannot retrieve latest commit at this time. Or is it GitHub Security, stopping us from cloning this dangerous repo?

225 points by scaredpelican 6mo ago

scaredpelican 6mo ago

How does this only have a single star. This is genuinely mind blowing.

rolph 6mo ago
first release 18hrs ago...

sanieldoe 6mo ago

This is amazing! Limitation breeds creativity indeed

nullc 6mo ago

Maybe put the probe on a spring loaded linear sensor, and move down until it hits a target offset (could just be read by a simple flag in an optical sensor)-- resulting in hitting a constant target force.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

Havoc 6mo ago

Can't say I fully understand it but this certainly smells like someone is getting hired off a single github repo as CV

ghurtado 6mo ago
Nowadays the former seems to be a requirement for the latter, so I'm inclined to agree with you
DaiPlusPlus 6mo ago
> someone is getting hired off a single github repo as CV Isn't that a good thing?
Unsponsoredio 6mo ago
not a bad strategy. one repo that shows you can duct tape commodity hardware together and let an agent handle the workflow beats 50 leetcode solutions on your profile. the interesting part is the cost ratio. commercial flying probe setups run 5 figures with proprietary software. this is a weekend build that gets you most of the way there for under 500 bucks.

deanputney 6mo ago

Wow that's nuts. What a great idea! I wonder how much of this the commercial flying probe machines can do already. Pretty cool to be able to have this on a home scale.

chromacity 6mo ago

It's both cool and a bit confusing. Is this an attempt to commoditize flying-probe testing for PCBs? An attempt to use LLMs to reverse-engineer circuits? Both? It almost feels like it would benefit from being split into two projects. If I'm testing my own PCBs, I probably don't want an agent in charge, at least not routinely. There's just no reason for the added cost, complexity, or non-determinism. And if I'm reversing someone else's design, then going through the effort of building an auto-prober seems like an overkill, especially since a single probe is seldom enough. Even the simplest serial interface will often have one line for clock and another for data, so you're gonna be manually making connections either way.

Animats 6mo ago

Interesting. Not clear what it really does. The hardware is an oscilloscope probe on a 3-axis CNC mechanism. That's called a "flying probe", and you can buy one.[1] Fine. But what does the AI do? It "ingests the project", but what does that mean? Finding all the pins? That's a start. Using a SPICE model to figure out what should be on each pin, and checking? Now that would be impressive. Probably something in between. The usual use for this sort of thing is that you probe a known-good board to find out what voltages and signals appear where, and then compare with newly manufactured boards. That's a common production check. There's potential here. If the AI has some concept of what the board under test is doing, and can diagnose problems, that's quite useful. [1] https://huntron.com/products/access2.htm https://huntron.com/products/access2.htm

apimade 6mo ago
From my understanding is you’d probe the board during different operations, process the results and deduct what signals are useful and traffic transmitting across the board (I.E private keys, what protocols are used, debug interfaces, firmware components, chip functions, etc).
xyzzy123 6mo ago
I think the novel idea here is you jam some hardware together (whatever you like) that can do "physical real world" things with a well understood interface and then spin up Claude with access to it. The way I'm thinking about it is, it's a _workflow_ innovation? So you ask for data sheets for all the visible chips and get PDFs in an output directory with minimal user interaction except to flip the board, ask for a basic idea of connectivity, get a stitched high res surface image etc.... which of course are all currently possible, but you can do them potentially with very low effort. There doesn't have to be a _software stack_ ahead of time. You ask Claude to do the thing, it will figure out how to do it, write some code, pull in some OSS and make the thing happen. You can take this project's software or leave it. You might say "tell me where you think the JTAG headers are" and it will come up with a workflow to do its best at that task (most likely with variable results...), but nonetheless this is not a thing you can ask of any commercial product I am aware of today. With probes, stuff can get interesting. Of course experienced hardware & reverse engineers already can do all this stuff and have a plethora of workflows for it but I still think it's an interesting POC of a generalisable approach. You can take or leave this particular software stack. Also, the hardware barely matters, you can duct tape whatever to whatever.

esbranson 6mo ago

> digitally guided fabrication > New York[1] [1] https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/keeping-new-yorkers-safe-governor-hochul-highlights-growing-support-nation-leading-proposals https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/keeping-new-yorkers-safe-go...

gbgarbeb 6mo ago
Kathy Hochul is cracking down on illegal flying probe machines.

uSoldering 6mo ago

It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting this to be real more than I do, but this is nowhere close to being ready to do actual work. Photographing real PCBs is hard, there is no fiducial maths, no actual probing is being done. It's just photos of a photo being piped into an agent. If it actually did what it claims, no reasonable person would exclude it from the demo video. https://gainsec.com/2026/04/16/autoprober/ https://gainsec.com/2026/04/16/autoprober/

maininformer 6mo ago
Could an agent no develop a bespoke correction algorithm for the photos of the photo?
- uSoldering 6mo ago
  Why feed it photos of a photo when you could just feed it the photo that was printed out?

vatsachak 6mo ago

Same guy who made the Flock hacking tool

odie5533 6mo ago

Guy builds car from stick of gum, paperclip, and an old vehicle

contingencies 6mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGyver https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGyver

callumprentice 6mo ago

I figured this was some kind of home-grown prosthetic arm whose wearer could, using AI, draw any artwork online, speak ASL, perform minor surgery on themselves and so much more so long as their supply of tokens lasted. Perhaps a smidge disappointed when I had a look and discovered it wasn't that :)

claytonia 6mo ago

Cool demo, but letting an AI Agent drive a physical probe may have problems. AI is probabilistic, but hardware is precise. If the model miscalculates a pin's position by even 0.1mm, the probe may crush the board. I am curious how the author actually bridges the gap between the Agent’s 'guess' and the sub-millimeter precision needed to avoid damaging hardware?

par1970 6mo ago
I think this is roughly solved. Tell the agent to do all of its calculations in python.
- delfinom 6mo ago
  ...OR if you are developing a PCB, you have the design data, and pick and place data and the gerber data. Any combination of such gives you positions of everything within micrometers. This is not a new problem. Testing of PCBs has been solved a billion times over and the world has had bed of nails tester and flying probe testers for 4 decades old. We have a 8 finger flying probe machine at our facility that literally all we do is load the board in, load in the design data. It identifies points of interests, learns the fiducials and we let it do a characterization run. We then have engineering review of the resulting data and just let it fly afterwards. None of this requires AI. But nowadays any linear regression qualifies as AI so imma go slap a label on it.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
jstanley 6mo ago
A spring-loaded probe would seem sufficient.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

NegativeLatency 6mo ago

Would be cool if you could use this (with 2 probes) to build a wiring net for reverse engineering.

shevy-java 6mo ago

I watched the linked in video: https://videos.files.wordpress.com/gD3kAWlO/autoprober-demo.mp4 https://videos.files.wordpress.com/gD3kAWlO/autoprober-demo.... But I am not sure what do I see there? Is that some 3D printing?

kuizu 6mo ago

A similar concept, but with multiple probes at the same time, was published in this blog series as open source hard- and software: https://www.schutzwerk.com/en/blog/proboter-01/ https://www.schutzwerk.com/en/blog/proboter-01/ They explain some of the use cases in this demo video https://youtu.be/TYEjZA-xbGo?is=osWXCrBkLOi4JHxO https://youtu.be/TYEjZA-xbGo?is=osWXCrBkLOi4JHxO

burgerone 6mo ago

Annoyingly misleading title unfortunately.

lrvick 6mo ago

This looks super useful, but I wish authors could stop doing these silly "source available" plays. Instead of donating to a project one has to buy GPU time to convert it to FOSS.

Jamesbeam 6mo ago

Finally i don’t need to press any buttons on my bionic arm any longer, the AI can find the pin on its own. What a glorious time to be alive. Claude really is going to bring pleasure to the people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgtO5sebA9U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgtO5sebA9U

micromacrofoot 6mo ago

why not just take a photo with your phone and upload that to the llm

zombot 6mo ago

GitHub, that crappy POS, is down again. > Cannot retrieve latest commit at this time. Or is it GitHub Security, stopping us from cloning this dangerous repo?