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I don't think people have realized it yet, but AI can do hardware too. That's what I had hoped this was about. I had Claude design an entire 4 layer rp2040 bas

I don't think people have realized it yet, but AI can do hardware too. That's what I had hoped this was about. I had Claude design an entire 4 layer rp2040 based PCB from scratch and PCBWay build it. It worked on the first go, other than some silkscreen overlapped, which doesn't hurt anything. That was before Fable. Then I had it design a case for the new pcb to 3d print. Also worked the first go, but with minor cosmetic issues. People have yet to even BEGIN to appreciate what these things can do with the right harness.

ynac 3mo ago
Witness. I've built three small projects from idea to pilot runs with Ai. Some parts of the process I had some solid experience with, and other parts I was holding the hand of my Ai and hoping he was sober and benevolent. I often had laughing fits of glee when things worked AND I understood them. As good as Ai is at just doing stuff, it's better at explaining and teaching. The back and forth made all the projects better, cheaper, tougher, and ultimately more usable.
CamperBob2 3mo ago
What harness have you been using for EDA/CAD stuff?
javchz 3mo ago
Im surprised by how bad LLMs are with SVGs but somehow are oke-ish with CAD and other weird files.
- utopiah 3mo ago
  For circuits then can be simulated. They have a of constraints that might make the problem space a lot smaller. Maybe there are also a lot of text on what makes a good design. I also believe most design related to a physical object have documentation justifying the choices.
- DoctorOetker 3mo ago
  An SVG is like a cartoon, and throws away a lot of information, a "good SVG" of some subject chosen to be familiar to both animals and humans might look good to one but not the other. The cycling flamingo is a kind of art curation test. Functional PCB "artwork" is actually not intended for visual consumption, it must meet constraints and advice scattered in documentation, prior "art" in the training corpus, etc. It doesn't need to be surprising at all A good static SVG cartoon can be viewed as a multispectral photographic video, with a lot of information thrown away and distorted or oversimplified. Different species will disagree about what information should have been kept vs thrown away. A bee would "complain" it can't see any of the plant's UV markers when presented with plant imagery. Many animals depend on motion or movement to identify predator or prey. At a certain point culture and personal life experiences start conflicting even within the human subgroup, and we see people argue why this or that flamingo is better than the other.
arjie 3mo ago
What do you to get the case? I use build123d with Python and the results are pretty good!
Foobar8568 3mo ago
My attempt at VHDL was a failure but at least it helped me to get a modern build on a Sockit. But that was a few months ago, getting high hope with fable and seeing killed before I could even try it for that project killed all my motivations.
ben_w 3mo ago
That's mildly surprising to me, given what I've seen when I ask current models to make an SVG of something. Would I be on the right track if I guessed there's a DSL for designing PCBs that would help enforce functional correctness?
- throwaway219450 3mo ago
  A lot of human PCB errors could be caught by analyzing the netlist against requirements and knowledge of the datasheet. Schematic and board formats are usually plaintext, so you can generate those directly even. Or kicad + python? That’s probably enough for an LLM to check if you’ve mis-wired something, missed a part or chose the wrong resistor to set a regulator voltage. Plus good old DRC/ERC. If you pass all of those, there’s a good chance things will work unless your placement is really bad, but you could manually lay out and autoroute a lot of simple boards. Not to belittle the parent but a 4 layer board is actually simpler in some ways because you have a power plane which is one less net to worry about. For analog work you can even run a SPICE simulation.
  - mapontosevenths 3mo ago
    You got it. It was kicad and python, with the builtin DRC/ERC. It had to iterate quite a lot to get it to pass, but once it did the board was solid, if not elegant. I almost feel like kicad was the real hero. A human would have done a better job, and maybe used half the PCB... but it got it done and at the end of the day the board is 100% functional, and 100% machine designed.
- taneq 3mo ago
  Maybe there’s more PCB designs on the internet than there are pelicans riding bikes? ;)
  - ben_w 3mo ago
    Could well be, but my case was "illustrate this orbit" rather than copying Simon Willson. After a few rounds, I gave up on asking the LLM and just drew my SVG in BBEdit.
rusk 3mo ago
In so far as AI can do hardware reliably you can bet your bottom dollar the big chip fabs have already been doing that. They don’t call it AI though and the models aren’t language based, surprisingly enough /s
- davemp 3mo ago
  EDA tools have been using ML techniques for >10yrs afaik
  - rusk 3mo ago
    Yes they don’t call it AI
PowerElectronix 3mo ago
For small stuff, sure. For something with more components I don't think it's ever gonna be useful. Routing a pcb is an np-hard problem and, imho, no AI has enough actual thinking capability to make a good job out of it.
- adwn 3mo ago
  The human brain hasn't solved NP-hardness, either. We make it work using heuristics and automation tools, which in turn use heuristics themselves. I see no reason why AI wouldn't be able to take the same approach.
  - altmanaltman 3mo ago
    I mean we already have seen this happen with AlphaDev. Not sure why AI would fail at working on NP-hard problems if our current way is to basically guess and keep trying until something clicks (something that is not difficult for an AI system that can just keep running).
  - ablob 3mo ago
    What exactly do you mean by "solved NP-hardness"?
- CamperBob2 3mo ago
  An AI that can thrash a Go grandmaster can route a PCB. There's no reason to think a conventional LLM is the right approach, of course. But the LLM could delegate the task to a program it wrote, given the right prompting and the right feedback loop(s).
yuppiepuppie 3mo ago
> Then I had it design a case for the new pcb to 3d print. Can you elaborate on this? What did you use to "design" it? Im thinking of getting a 3d printer and would love to explore this intersection a bit more.
nerdsniper 3mo ago
What confidence would you have in AI's ability to do 20-40GHz signal routing with good integrity? HDMI + USB4 + USB-C DP AltMode and a bunch of USB4 routing/switching fabric stuff?
- embedding-shape 3mo ago
  Hook it up so it can experiment away by itself with tools, provide a end goal and ask it to iterate until it reached it. What the "AI can do vs not" becomes more about how long you can let it do inference in such loop, with local hardware it gets really cheap (granted you have the hardware already), with remote inference cost is probably the limiter.
  - nerdsniper 3mo ago
    > Hook it up so it can experiment away by itself with tools, provide a end goal and ask it to iterate until it reached it Those "tools" you throw out so cavalierly cost around $50,000 to $300,000 per annual seat license with all the optional packages needed for 40GHz signals (like Cadence Allegro + Sigrity X Speed / SystemSI). Even if AI could do it it'd be much cheaper ($3-8k) to get someone in China to use their license and knowledge to do it.
    - embedding-shape 3mo ago
      But how is cost related to "AI's ability to do X"? Of course if you can't afford the required tools, or inference for that part, remote or local, then you can't do any of that stuff. The same if you don't speak/know the language the specifications/manuals/guides are done in, and you can't afford a translator, but kind of besides the point when we're trying to discuss AI's ability to do something.
      - nerdsniper 3mo ago
        For hobby stuff, I'd like to create some boards that involve a bit more than the usual MCU. Things like PCIe or USB4 or HDMI. If AI can't do those things for <$2,000 it doesn't make a difference to my life. At some point the cost makes it irrelevant. If you drive a Bugatti Chiron, you don't care about the price of petrol. Humans or AI, there's not really a difference if the capital costs vastly outweigh the labor costs.
chasd00 3mo ago
I tried my hand at making a pcb for a project in high power rocketry but I gave up in frustration. Maybe I’ll try again and see if claudecode can help me get over the hump.
- MSFT_Edging 3mo ago
  Yeah lets just take the human out of the loop in regards to the DIY missile. Sure.
  - chasd00 3mo ago
    haha not really, so in larger model rockets they go so high that you use two parachutes. The first is deployed at apogee but it's very small so the rocket descends fast and doesn't float (miles in some cases) away, the second is larger and deployed at a pre-set altitude to slow the rocket enough to hit the ground without causing damage to itself or whatever it lands on. To do this you have an onboard altimeter and small blackpowder charges that are used to "pop" out the parachutes. The altimeters are available OTC but i wanted to use my pi-zero and an IMU with a barometer. What I was designing was an i2c pyro board that could ignite up to 4 e-matches that sets off the blackpowder charges. I've met the guy that made this altimeter, it's pretty amazing. The hobby is filled with engineers so some of the stuff they come up with is impressive. https://www.featherweightaltimeters.com/blue-raven-altimeter.html https://www.featherweightaltimeters.com/blue-raven-altimeter...

ynac 3mo ago

Witness. I've built three small projects from idea to pilot runs with Ai. Some parts of the process I had some solid experience with, and other parts I was holding the hand of my Ai and hoping he was sober and benevolent. I often had laughing fits of glee when things worked AND I understood them. As good as Ai is at just doing stuff, it's better at explaining and teaching. The back and forth made all the projects better, cheaper, tougher, and ultimately more usable.

CamperBob2 3mo ago

What harness have you been using for EDA/CAD stuff?

javchz 3mo ago

Im surprised by how bad LLMs are with SVGs but somehow are oke-ish with CAD and other weird files.

utopiah 3mo ago
For circuits then can be simulated. They have a of constraints that might make the problem space a lot smaller. Maybe there are also a lot of text on what makes a good design. I also believe most design related to a physical object have documentation justifying the choices.
DoctorOetker 3mo ago
An SVG is like a cartoon, and throws away a lot of information, a "good SVG" of some subject chosen to be familiar to both animals and humans might look good to one but not the other. The cycling flamingo is a kind of art curation test. Functional PCB "artwork" is actually not intended for visual consumption, it must meet constraints and advice scattered in documentation, prior "art" in the training corpus, etc. It doesn't need to be surprising at all A good static SVG cartoon can be viewed as a multispectral photographic video, with a lot of information thrown away and distorted or oversimplified. Different species will disagree about what information should have been kept vs thrown away. A bee would "complain" it can't see any of the plant's UV markers when presented with plant imagery. Many animals depend on motion or movement to identify predator or prey. At a certain point culture and personal life experiences start conflicting even within the human subgroup, and we see people argue why this or that flamingo is better than the other.

arjie 3mo ago

What do you to get the case? I use build123d with Python and the results are pretty good!

Foobar8568 3mo ago

My attempt at VHDL was a failure but at least it helped me to get a modern build on a Sockit. But that was a few months ago, getting high hope with fable and seeing killed before I could even try it for that project killed all my motivations.

ben_w 3mo ago

That's mildly surprising to me, given what I've seen when I ask current models to make an SVG of something. Would I be on the right track if I guessed there's a DSL for designing PCBs that would help enforce functional correctness?

throwaway219450 3mo ago
A lot of human PCB errors could be caught by analyzing the netlist against requirements and knowledge of the datasheet. Schematic and board formats are usually plaintext, so you can generate those directly even. Or kicad + python? That’s probably enough for an LLM to check if you’ve mis-wired something, missed a part or chose the wrong resistor to set a regulator voltage. Plus good old DRC/ERC. If you pass all of those, there’s a good chance things will work unless your placement is really bad, but you could manually lay out and autoroute a lot of simple boards. Not to belittle the parent but a 4 layer board is actually simpler in some ways because you have a power plane which is one less net to worry about. For analog work you can even run a SPICE simulation.
- mapontosevenths 3mo ago
  You got it. It was kicad and python, with the builtin DRC/ERC. It had to iterate quite a lot to get it to pass, but once it did the board was solid, if not elegant. I almost feel like kicad was the real hero. A human would have done a better job, and maybe used half the PCB... but it got it done and at the end of the day the board is 100% functional, and 100% machine designed.
taneq 3mo ago
Maybe there’s more PCB designs on the internet than there are pelicans riding bikes? ;)
- ben_w 3mo ago
  Could well be, but my case was "illustrate this orbit" rather than copying Simon Willson. After a few rounds, I gave up on asking the LLM and just drew my SVG in BBEdit.

rusk 3mo ago

In so far as AI can do hardware reliably you can bet your bottom dollar the big chip fabs have already been doing that. They don’t call it AI though and the models aren’t language based, surprisingly enough /s

davemp 3mo ago
EDA tools have been using ML techniques for >10yrs afaik
- rusk 3mo ago
  Yes they don’t call it AI

PowerElectronix 3mo ago

For small stuff, sure. For something with more components I don't think it's ever gonna be useful. Routing a pcb is an np-hard problem and, imho, no AI has enough actual thinking capability to make a good job out of it.

adwn 3mo ago
The human brain hasn't solved NP-hardness, either. We make it work using heuristics and automation tools, which in turn use heuristics themselves. I see no reason why AI wouldn't be able to take the same approach.
- altmanaltman 3mo ago
  I mean we already have seen this happen with AlphaDev. Not sure why AI would fail at working on NP-hard problems if our current way is to basically guess and keep trying until something clicks (something that is not difficult for an AI system that can just keep running).
- ablob 3mo ago
  What exactly do you mean by "solved NP-hardness"?
CamperBob2 3mo ago
An AI that can thrash a Go grandmaster can route a PCB. There's no reason to think a conventional LLM is the right approach, of course. But the LLM could delegate the task to a program it wrote, given the right prompting and the right feedback loop(s).

yuppiepuppie 3mo ago

> Then I had it design a case for the new pcb to 3d print. Can you elaborate on this? What did you use to "design" it? Im thinking of getting a 3d printer and would love to explore this intersection a bit more.

nerdsniper 3mo ago

What confidence would you have in AI's ability to do 20-40GHz signal routing with good integrity? HDMI + USB4 + USB-C DP AltMode and a bunch of USB4 routing/switching fabric stuff?

embedding-shape 3mo ago
Hook it up so it can experiment away by itself with tools, provide a end goal and ask it to iterate until it reached it. What the "AI can do vs not" becomes more about how long you can let it do inference in such loop, with local hardware it gets really cheap (granted you have the hardware already), with remote inference cost is probably the limiter.
- nerdsniper 3mo ago
  > Hook it up so it can experiment away by itself with tools, provide a end goal and ask it to iterate until it reached it Those "tools" you throw out so cavalierly cost around $50,000 to $300,000 per annual seat license with all the optional packages needed for 40GHz signals (like Cadence Allegro + Sigrity X Speed / SystemSI). Even if AI could do it it'd be much cheaper ($3-8k) to get someone in China to use their license and knowledge to do it.
  - embedding-shape 3mo ago
    But how is cost related to "AI's ability to do X"? Of course if you can't afford the required tools, or inference for that part, remote or local, then you can't do any of that stuff. The same if you don't speak/know the language the specifications/manuals/guides are done in, and you can't afford a translator, but kind of besides the point when we're trying to discuss AI's ability to do something.
    - nerdsniper 3mo ago
      For hobby stuff, I'd like to create some boards that involve a bit more than the usual MCU. Things like PCIe or USB4 or HDMI. If AI can't do those things for <$2,000 it doesn't make a difference to my life. At some point the cost makes it irrelevant. If you drive a Bugatti Chiron, you don't care about the price of petrol. Humans or AI, there's not really a difference if the capital costs vastly outweigh the labor costs.

chasd00 3mo ago

I tried my hand at making a pcb for a project in high power rocketry but I gave up in frustration. Maybe I’ll try again and see if claudecode can help me get over the hump.

MSFT_Edging 3mo ago
Yeah lets just take the human out of the loop in regards to the DIY missile. Sure.
- chasd00 3mo ago
  haha not really, so in larger model rockets they go so high that you use two parachutes. The first is deployed at apogee but it's very small so the rocket descends fast and doesn't float (miles in some cases) away, the second is larger and deployed at a pre-set altitude to slow the rocket enough to hit the ground without causing damage to itself or whatever it lands on. To do this you have an onboard altimeter and small blackpowder charges that are used to "pop" out the parachutes. The altimeters are available OTC but i wanted to use my pi-zero and an IMU with a barometer. What I was designing was an i2c pyro board that could ignite up to 4 e-matches that sets off the blackpowder charges. I've met the guy that made this altimeter, it's pretty amazing. The hobby is filled with engineers so some of the stuff they come up with is impressive. https://www.featherweightaltimeters.com/blue-raven-altimeter.html https://www.featherweightaltimeters.com/blue-raven-altimeter...