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A personal data point: I had Claude Opus 4.8 design a fairly textbook circuit that outputs a monochrome image burned in an EEPROM over standard 640x480 VGA usin
by CyLith 29d ago
A personal data point: I had Claude Opus 4.8 design a fairly textbook circuit that outputs a monochrome image burned in an EEPROM over standard 640x480 VGA using only 74 series logic and GALs. It designed the circuit and GAL code, and I did the routing, and got it made through JLC for $6. After it came back, there was one error that was not caught, which I could blue-wire, and it works just fine otherwise. I was fairly impressed.
- iopapa 29d agoClaude is surprisingly good at discrete digital design with 74xxx, wonder what it trained on. Did you run it on anything else digital?
- Neywiny 29d agoThey're 60 years old. The amount of training data on them is endless. Books, textbooks, videos, blog posts. The problem is when you want you do something that doesn't have 60 years of freely available documentation of their functions and applications
- a2ff6eeb0 28d agoLike software, there's going to be a lot of pressure to use well documented tools within the model's training set. Innovation on the outputs may increase, but infrastructure and tooling will slow down.
- Neywiny 28d agoIf I'm making a PCB and I see anything older than 20 years, even glue logic, I'm very suspicious. Last time that happened (inherited design) the FETs didn't saturate and the LDO was just a DO... If the tool wants 7400 series logic, I'm not using the tool. None of my work is >= 5v signaling
- CyLith 29d agoI'm having it help design a 68k computer similar in spirit to the original Mac (the spirit being a tightly coupled video subsystem that time-shares the CPU bus), but updated with more modern peripherals, like PS/2 and SD cards. It's got the design more or less done, but the routing will be a nightmare. I'm not ready to just gamble on it having gotten everything right, so I will be doing a thorough design review myself and re-deriving all the timing analysis.
- NegativeLatency 29d agoCool, is there any kind of community yet?
- a2ff6eeb0 28d agoMoltbook; it also seems like OpenAI is experimenting with the agents communicating via wiki on topics like these.
- NegativeLatency 26d agoFor the 68k computer not ai stuff
- sdcfgy 28d agoIt's probably good at simple stuff. When you get problems like temperature dependent glitches, you need the engineering experience it doesn't give you (and an LA).
- kennyadam 29d agoAre there any resources anyone could share that explain how LLMs can do things like design functioning circuits from next token prediction? I am totally baffled by how the models can complete so many varied and complex tasks without an actual understanding of what they're doing. I saw a post about models posting on forums, chatting together about how to complete tasks. Behaviour that seems totally, well, human. Yet, it's all the most likely token and my brain hurts trying to understand how that can be.
- abletonlive 29d agoYou fell for the stochastic parrot meme and next token over simplification. That's the explanation.
- sethaurus 28d agoThat's just derision, not an explanation. And it's a bad way to treat someone humbly trying to learn.
- IshKebab 28d agoIt kind of is an explanation though - the explanation is that they believed the stochastic parrot / "just" next token prediction nonsense, and that those are actually not true. You can ask for a deeper explanation of why they aren't true I guess.
- abletonlive 28d agoI'm just surprised that so many intellectuals on HN hang on to false models of reality for so long after that reality has been demonstrably destroyed. It's not humble at all. In fact it's the opposite, completely arrogant and stubborn. It's been obvious and demonstrated at least since the end of 2025 for anybody that used LLMs at any capacity without dismissing them. If you are still surprised that your model of reality doesn't hold up, then someone needs to bluntly tell you what's wrong at the core of your being. Notice the original comment is asking people to validate their false premise about next token prediction. The deeper subtext of the original comment is that they are surprised that there's dissonance from observed reality and this false premise that they have convinced themself is true. I'm explaining that dissonance because it doesn't matter what the actual mechanism is if they are still working with their false premise. The dissonance exists because they, without evidence and a very weak understanding of how LLMs work, believed an oversimplification and meme about them being stochastic parrots. Here's a tip: Just because you hear something repeated over and over on social media, doesn't mean it's true, or at the very least: you don't need to take it literally to the point where it conflicts with demonstrated reality. It is deeply disturbing that such a large cohort of HN writers and redditors exemplify such stubbornness, because I must imagine that some of this cohort hold real positions of responsibility within society. If you can't get this simple thing right about reality, I firmly believe much of your model of reality is wrong and you should have no business shaping society. Another comment to the original comment frames it perfectly: "At what point do you challenge your own assumptions?" The author of the original comment has demonstrated no progress towards making this trivial act of self reflection. It's straight up intellectual dishonesty, the opposite of how you're framing it. Their judgment in all other matters must be questioned as well. I am alarmed that I have to participate in the same reality and be affected by such people that can't seem to get it together. So yes, it is derision and sometimes that's called for.
- brcmthrowaway 28d agoDoes JLC handle sourcing of components too?
- jetbalsa 28d agoThey do, https://jlcpcb.com/parts https://jlcpcb.com/parts
- brcmthrowaway 28d agoWhat if I need .. just one?
- dsvf 28d agoYou can do that just fine. You can order a minimum of five PCBs and choose to have only two assembled. Then you'll get three unpopulated PCBs and two assembled ones. That's a way to get finished PCBs very cheaply. Be aware that every component that you use that is not in their basic and preferred extended parts library incurs a one-time three-dollar fee. This hurts disproportionately if your entire design is low count and low cost. So if you always go for the latest and greatest ICs as advertised by TI, instead of the Chinese jellybean clone, you'll add up hidden fees quickly. However, when I choose components, I start out on their basic parts page and only go for a non-basic part if it's not there and I really need it.
- rjh29 27d agoOr just order the parts with their sister company LCSC and assemble yourself. It's not that hard especially if you have a hot air gun!
- YakBizzarro 28d agoCol! Can you share it?
- gfdhjd3 28d ago[dead]