6 ms·

PCB is brought to you by Fable 5

41 points by jasonpeacock 19d ago

smalltorch 19d ago
Very cool! Can you reveal how much this custom board cost you?
- Cyan488 19d ago
  > For five fully assembled boards I paid 130 Euros, ordered the E-ink displays from a local shop I built a project board nearly identical to this one a few years ago, and this seems about right. I don't think the displays themselves are included in the 130 euros. They can vary a lot in price depending on spec and supplier.
  - a6mzero 16d ago
    Yes indeed. I paid 7.5 euros extra per e-ink display. So it was 33.5 euros per board.
- ac29 19d ago
  I sent in a larger, slightly more complex board to JLCPCB over the weekend and it was $175 for 5 boards with components and assembly. Shipping, tariffs (ouch), and sales taxes added another ~$100 or so.
Cyan488 19d ago
I built a project nearly identical to this one so knowing the level of complexity required, I'm not surprised it worked. AI is indeed raising the floor. Even simple hobby designs were once out of reach, but now we can "YOLO it and build stuff fast without necessarily knowing about the details" as the author puts it. That said, without experience it's easy to pierce the veil of "simple circuitry" by accident, just like in XKCD: Tasks[1]. Looking at preview of the author's next project at the end of the article, I'm not so sure the same strategy will work. The board is probably two orders of magnitude more complex. Without knowing the circuit details, I see many red flags (randomly placed ics and decoupling, likely wrong length matching, random thick traces indicating lack of foresight on power distribution, backwards connectors, the probably unnecessary use of BGA footprints, etc). [1]: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/
- ramesh31 19d ago
  This seems to fall into the same category I've seen with basically all agent driven software as well. That is to say, "Amazing that someone with no experience could do this, but not interesting at all in its own right". Call me when AI is laying out the next TSMC node.
XRG 19d ago
As someone who does both hardware design (mostly high precision analog electronics) and software engineering, the difference between both fields in AI capability is striking. Models like Fable and Astra can provide lots of interesting insights into the design of specialty electronics when prompted correctly. Yet they can hardly put that knowledge to work if instructed to generate a schematic or lay out a PCB. Of course, for readers here with a solid grasp on how LLM's operate it's not exactly surprising. Still, I feel this is exactly the kind of thing that drives home that the way we reason about (general) intelligence does not map cleanly to LLM operation, no matter how advanced the current models are.
- crote 19d ago
  If anything, it is surprising that the LLM is so bad at stealing a ready-made RP2350 design! There are plenty of easy-to-find tutorials like [0] and [1] that handhold you through the entire design process, and a simple search will give you dozens of design files for open-source boards. At this level of board complexity you almost have to try to make it completely non-functional, so although it is nice to see it in practice I am not exactly surprised that a LLM with a decent bunch of assistance managed to do it. But there's quite a gap between the equivalent of poorly copying a "Hello World" from StackOverflow and making actual production-ready boards. [0]: https://pip-assets.raspberrypi.com/categories/1214-rp2350/documents/RP-008280-DS-2-hardware-design-with-rp2350.pdf https://pip-assets.raspberrypi.com/categories/1214-rp2350/do... [1]: https://jlcpcb.com/blog/how-to-design-layout-with-rp2350 https://jlcpcb.com/blog/how-to-design-layout-with-rp2350
  - genxy 16d ago
    You have to be more specific about what you mean by design. The models are excellent and the netlist and the components along with tradeoffs.
    - akiselev 16d ago
      Design means PCB routing. A schematic is the PCB equivalent to a Mermaid diagram.
crote 19d ago
Would you be willing to share the full design files? Considering most of the PCB is well-trodden territory, it would be quite interesting to see the details what it actually came up with!
sottol 19d ago
I'm still waiting on my order of 15 PCBs done with Sol - a mini-BT-keyboard that I hope will be comparable to the Psion 5 / Gemini PDA ones, using Kailh PG1316S switches. I still need to design and manufacture a housing (I do have a lot of hobbyist experience with this though), but the idea is to have a magsafe-connectable keyboard I can clip onto my Pixel and make use of the new Linux subsystem (or Termux) and do some productive stuff on the go. It's just been manufactured by JLC but not shipped yet. Funny enough, production itself was ~$70, then $80 for shipping, taxes and fees (tarriffs?). Instead of directly generating Kicad, I chose to let it write "generators" in Python that output Kicad (S-Exps!) pcb and project - with mixed results - but I can generate a version with/without per-key Neopixels and customize certain parts of the board, including debug-stuff. I also _think_ this makes it easier to resume working on this in new sessions but not sure. Otoh, I never actually looked at the Python (vibed...) so it's still a lot of hard-coding. I also landed on and used KicadRoutingTools after trying FreeRouting, combined with some minimal "auto-placing" code for larger ICs and such that are placed with certain constraints. My routing runs are way slower though - on the order of minutes. I always wanted to try atopile - that might be a good match for AI/PCB work. The only thing that really held me back was the lack of routing.
- ac29 19d ago
  > I always wanted to try atopile - that might be a good match for AI/PCB work. Unfortunately all public open source work halted 6 months ago and they pivoted to a browser based IDE product to monetize: https://atopile.io/blog/atopile-v16 https://atopile.io/blog/atopile-v16
  - sottol 19d ago
    Thanks :(
  - ost-ing 16d ago
    I followed them for a while before the AI craze started. It looked promising back then, but I wasnt willing to invest time and attention back then on something so new. Good thing I didn’t
- 19d ago
seveibar 16d ago
AI is exceptionally good at RP2040/RP2350/ESP32-based boards, we've ordered ~15 unique designs, mostly RP2040-based that were designed and autorouted with AI using tscircuit and usually OpenAI models. Currently the major mistakes that AI makes: 1) Improperly rotated connectors (backwards USB port) 2) Endless routing loops for complex boards 3) Really huge/unreadable single page schematics I'm extremely bullish on AI for PCB design, but there is a huge, huge tooling gap. We basically need to soup up all our collective design rule checks so that AI can work in corrective loops. It needs to check for things like "opamp schematic layout conventional" and "trace width closely matches reference design for chip". One thing that makes me super excited is supply-chain resiliency when chip/subcircuit-swapping becomes super easy
- smart_asslop 16d ago
  [flagged]
- cushychicken 16d ago
  I’ve found that codifying design rules as skills is a major help in this area.
- crote 16d ago
  Those are "reinvent the world" level of changes. We're talking about an industry where nothing is standardized, and you want to rely on highly formalized documentation!? I'm not exaggerating when I say that "which way is up" is an unsolved problem right now. Getting the industry to adopt a standardized manufacturing file format and standardized files describing things like footprints and pinouts would be a massive breakthrough. Let's start with that.
  - seveibar 14d ago
    Standardization is extremely unlikely, chip manufacturers won't/haven't made a major effort here and having spoken with some, they don't want to. It is much easier and more feasible at this point to do automated visual analysis against the footprint and discovered photos from the internet
N_Lens 16d ago
The machine designed the circuit board in two hours, which was impressive, and the human understood it in never, which is becoming traditional.
brotchie 16d ago
This LED star PCB was 95% generated by Codex: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8a52LjovhcE https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8a52LjovhcE Was non-trivial (e.g. days and days of cumulative work) but worked with Codex to build up a parametric generator where I could adjust the star size, number of rings, leds per ring. It did all the LED-to-LED routing, panel layout with mouse bites, placed decoupling caps. At the time Codex wasn't as good at spatial reasoning, I expect that Astra would do this much faster. 4 x layer PCB with GND and 5V inner layers. WS2816B LEDs (not available in strips yet). 3D printed a frame so that two stars could be opposite each other (video shows only one side). ESP32 S3 on a 3.3v to 5v shifter board sandwiched in between. ESP32 wifi antenna pokes through and sits on a keep out section. Received control signals from a central controller via ESP Now.
- hxsbsnbdbs 16d ago
  Not to diminish your work, but this looks fairly trivial What exactly did the LLM do, write a generic generator for stars of different size and number of rays?
muglug 16d ago
Bought to us by Fable 5 and the more-experienced colleague who foresaw potential issues.
- yitchelle 16d ago
  Human in the loop.
BlackRabbit1 16d ago
If it's functional: that's a breakthrough. But: the PCB itself is not looking beautiful in terms of routing and a lot of schematic details yet. Horrible to to be more honest. But that's a minor issue. I'm not overly shocked. 90% of creating PCBs is copying reference schematics from vendor datasheets and connecting them. That's LLM territory. This mostly failed for now as they just did pdf2text and killed all documents. The last 10% are brutal (HF, EMC, high frequency multi-layer designs, etc.). But I managed LLMs to automatically create ngspice models using vision onto datasheets.. lol
- akiselev 16d ago
  Shameless plug for the slop coded CLI I use in my workflow: https://github.com/akiselev/datasheet-cli https://github.com/akiselev/datasheet-cli It just sends the PDF to Gemini Flash and asks it to extract semi structured data (semi structured in the sense that it's not fully structured extraction, but its a JSON file to feed into the next step of the LLM design process). Works pretty well in general, though I should update to the latest Gemini version.
  - CamperBob2 16d ago
    That's pretty cool! How reliable has the footprint extraction been?
    - SuperMouse 16d ago
      I tested it With Gemini 2.5 Flash. Works great.
helsinkiandrew 16d ago
> Upon Claude's compilation of the project, I asked it to prepare the required files for JLCPCB, and tell me what to select on their GUI It would be an interesting step to get Claude (or other LLM) to do order the PCBs itself on the JLCPCB website. We're nearly at the stage where you can describe what a device should do, let it design the circuit (using available components on JLCPCB), design a PCB and enclosure then order PCBs, assembly and 3d printed enclosure and get it sent to you for final assembly.
- ofrzeta 16d ago
  There's a plugin for Kicad https://github.com/bouni/kicad-jlcpcb-tools https://github.com/bouni/kicad-jlcpcb-tools
Rival67 16d ago
I've been working on several PCB projects, and agents are very helpful for automating many parts of the workflow. They're excellent for schematics. Complex routing, though, is still a human's job for now; I've watched Freerouting fall on its face many times. If you're doing six-layer high-speed DDR routing, AI won't solve that for you today. However checkout EDA tools https://github.com/l3wi/claude-eda/ https://github.com/l3wi/claude-eda/ https://github.com/drandyhaas/KiCadRoutingTools https://github.com/drandyhaas/KiCadRoutingTools
- amelius 16d ago
  That layout does not look very good: https://github.com/drandyhaas/KiCadRoutingTools/blob/main/docs/routed_all.png https://github.com/drandyhaas/KiCadRoutingTools/blob/main/do... I'm curious if this even works at high speed though I'm seeing what appears to be length-matched traces. Is the tool using an EM simulator in the process?
  - tonyarkles 16d ago
    I've installed it this morning to play around with on some low-speed designs before trying a high-speed design. Looking at that specific screenshot you posted there... that looks partially like a floor planning problem to me. Looking up the part number, that Ti90G529 is an FPGA, which also suggests that the overall routing could potentially get a lot better if the pads from the part on the left-hand side were shifted to all be on the "top" or "bottom" of U3 instead of divided across it the way it is right now. My first attempt on a low-speed not-dense board came out OK. There were a few odd choices, but I don't expect perfection from auto-routers. If nothing else, auto-routers are a good way to double-check that your floor planning is OK, even if you then rip up the auto-routed traces and hand route them instead.
kanwisher 16d ago
Yeah I've built about a dozen boards using GPT-sol 5.6 and my favorite is my Pi CM5 carrier board, to replace a laptop board in an old Sony Vaio p laptop. https://x.com/kanwisher/status/2089629411364745351?s=20 https://x.com/kanwisher/status/2089629411364745351?s=20
- EastMakes 16d ago
  Did it work ? It's funny, I made a CM5 board for my N40L not too long ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzW4rRsD8Uk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzW4rRsD8Uk Was sol5.6 good enough to do the actual HDMI / PCI-E and USB 3 Routing ?
ZuLuuuuuu 16d ago
In our company, we are doing high speed PCB designs with FPGAs, memories, ADCs, DACs etc. We are not yet using AI much in our PCB design workflow because our designs seem to be too complex for the AI solutions we have tried. Are there any areas where people are successfully incorporating AI to their PCB design workflow, even with complex, high speed designs? Schematic/layout review? Routing? Footprint creation?
- amelius 16d ago
  Why wouldn't an LLM be able to do high speed designs? Are you inventing new types of design rules for every board? Or is it simply because the automatic layout tools are not up to the task yet?
  - ZuLuuuuuu 16d ago
    It is just that the current tools out there seem to work for small or hobbyist boards currently. We couldn't apply them on our complex board designs. But maybe you had a different experience? I am curious on what kind of ways big companies are incorporating AI in their PCB design workflows currently.
  - sampullman 16d ago
    The feedback loop is too long, it's not like a software development harness that can direct the model to write some tests for complex behavior, and iterate until they pass. There a lots of things that can be subtly wrong, and it gets much worse as your signal frequency increases, or you have to deal with high power/radio/etc. The model (agent) has no way to validate its work.
PowerElectronix 16d ago
Yeah, we're still very far from a machine routing PCBs. Nice project, though, looks pretty fun to do it with an AI.
- a6mzero 16d ago
  I researched a bit on how to manufacture PCBs at home, and i came across Voltera V one. The price is indeed way too high, but I am hoping somebody will make a foss version of it. There are already pretty interesting foss PnP machines.
  - PowerElectronix 16d ago
    For a 2-layer pcb I would either go chemical etching or a small routing cnc. Chemical etching kits , uv lamps and blank pcbs are not "too" expensive, but it's more of a professional setup than a hobbyist. Just think of all the PCBs yoi can send to manufacture (and with 4 layers and more) for the price of even getting half the stuff.
    - Palomides 16d ago
      real PCBs are so much better than anything you can do at home, and so cheap, and so easy to order now, it's just not worth it
      - PowerElectronix 16d ago
        For a small lab where you have a moderate volume of oneoffs it's worth the investment. But, yeah, I wouldn't have that setup at home.
  - PunchyHamster 16d ago
    At current PCB prices that's kinda not worth it. Hell, even actual assembly isn't that expensive (at least if you have "a lot of few components" vs "big variety of components").
- lnsru 16d ago
applfanboysbgon 16d ago
> That said, I was not feeling much of an accomplishment, rightfully so. I used to enjoy the learning and the struggle that came with it. > Yes it does suck that the joy we had while building has been sucked out of us > For my hobby projects tho, I will continue to YOLO it and build stuff fast without necessarily knowing about the details. I don't understand this conclusion. LLMs sucked the joy out of it, didn't feel rewarding, you're forced to use them at work, so you decide... just keep doing it at home, too? Why not actually learn to build a proper PCB knowing you can do much better than this horrible (despite being dead-simple) board that only got there with the help of your expert colleague's guidance anyways? Don't succumb to utter laziness and deny yourself the satisfaction of learning new skills, that's letting the thing rot your brain out worse than any TV ever did.
- a6mzero 16d ago
  You are right. What I meant in my conclusion was more about : "I will use these tools to generate parts of a project I don't necessarily care about." I already started learning about proper PCB design, and I am actively fighting against choosing an LLM instead of grasping a concept fully. It's something I am struggling with, but all this is new for most of us. Hoping I will find a good balance at the end. Thanks for your remarks :)
  - applfanboysbgon 16d ago
    Fair enough. I think there is great value to using LLMs to assist in learning new hobbies, helping lessen the friction, and doing research. I just think it's sad if you let them replace your thinking completely instead of augmenting it. Cheers for the human-written blog post, I did enjoy reading it.
    - a6mzero 16d ago
      Thank you :) That means a lot to me.
      - tonyarkles 16d ago
wasabinator 16d ago
I saw the board cost, but how about the total cost in tokens to design it? Can empathise with the good and meh feeling you got from it. For me I try to stick with manual struggles with new concepts which grows my brain and allows me learn something new. But its impressive what LLMs can do.
- a6mzero 16d ago
  I am on Max 5x plan, so there were no additional costs. But the would-be API cost was around 450 usd.
amelius 16d ago
Can it shop autonomously on LCSC? Is it allowed to?
nullc 16d ago
It's pretty interesting to watch an LLM drive ngspice. ... clearly an area that could use more training, but good enough to make it less annoying for me to use.
kgwgk 16d ago
[The] Title Butcher strikes again! "PCB is brought to you by Fable 5" is pretty different from "This PCB is brought to you by Fable 5". Maybe you could do "PCB brought to you by Fable 5" if you are really against articles? Let's have a Fable 5 censorship agent or something...
negative_zero 16d ago
Now get it through compliance :)
_fizz_buzz_ 16d ago
I have used fable to aid me with PCB design. It is pretty good. But it can also sometimes make very human mistakes. It mixed up RX and TX on a uart line. If you don't catch stuff like that and get assembled boards this can obviously be pretty annoying. On the other hand I have also mixed up RX and TX before, lol.
- PunchyHamster 16d ago
  I feel like just leaving PCB routing and schematics for it is just waste of tokens. Once you have initial design (what chips to use, what each of them needs in terms of other components etc.) the schematic/PCB isn't the hard part but it is the hard part for the AI. It's great at stuff that humans take a lot of time like say "get me buck converters in that range of voltage in power, and put price of chip and supporting components in the table", and at least in not heavily analog designs, finding chips that fit the purpose, are available and in price range is good part of the work
NichoPaolucci 16d ago
Props on the build - bespoke tooling like this per human is a really cool timeline to live in. Personal tech. Related - Apparently this website is also "Brought to you by Fable"! It's very interesting how this occurs with any "website builder" - Squarespace, Wordpress, Wix... and now Claude + GPT! The elements look like every powerpoint I've seen in the last 6 months. Every report. Every internal document. It's all converged with similar typesetting, image / diagram placement... To me, the verbiage is the big one, this time, where it takes all the personality out of a site and essentially devoids it of any meaning. I am NOT saying that this post is AI generated (it very likely isn't), but a site that has all of those qualities is useless to me and devoid of any meaning, repulsive actually.
varispeed 16d ago
> I was not feeling much of an accomplishment, Why is this even required? I'll never understand this mindset. Because something came "easy", doesn't mean you haven't done anything meaningful to do it. I'd say there is more people that you can count that wouldn't be able to do this task even if the AI was literally guiding them by hand.
the__alchemist 16d ago
Hey - I ordered a board yesterday. I used Opus 5, Astra, and Sol at points to QC the board, and offer power routing advice. (The MCU is a brand new one, and poorly documented unless they send you an NDA and the full docs). Those models were not capable of even schematic editing or building. (I didn't bother with routing or placement). They made gross errors all over the schematic; changed the known-working parts and net routing I'd copy+pasted from previous boards, changed I2C to SPI for no reason, and generally produced an unusable, unreadable result. Overlapping symbols and labels etc.
- Neywiny 16d ago
  What do you mean by power routing for an MCU? Like they wanted to fatten the traces or what?
  - the__alchemist 16d ago
    It's an Atmosic Atm3430e, which includes RF energy harvesting. So, I'm using 3 power sources depending on the application: Coin cell, USB, and RF, with a 1v8 net for sensors. Its power pin routing has some particulars that are poorly documented, and there are no publicly available reference designs. There are a few design docs which help, but leave open questions. So, I used LLMs to help me figure out which pins to connect to which. They did not seem capable of actually doing the work directly, but they answered my questions. We will see how correctly in a few weeks... Also used LLMs to try to figure out how to flash/debug it. The setup I normally use (Tac-Connect ST-Link 6 pin + Probe-rs) won't work here; it's cortex-m, but their official guides indicate they want you do use a Segger J-Link, which I'm not ready to pay for at this point. It is a very expensive thing. So I'm going to try an NXP MCU-Link Pro. The St-Linkv3 I've been using will likely not work.
    - Neywiny 16d ago
      ?? I found the schematic here https://atmosic.com/products_kit_atmevk-3430e-yqn/ https://atmosic.com/products_kit_atmevk-3430e-yqn/ Is this not it? They even have the .pcb file if you download the full board doc which I believe is everything you need. This is a lot more than I thought you'd have to work with given your description. Full schematic, user guides, datasheet
GPerson 16d ago
It honestly just makes me think there’s little reason for me to be alive anymore.
- fsniper 16d ago
  I hope this is a joke and you really don't consider this as such. It's in fact opening up too many opportunities to us humans. It's never been this easy to acquire information and accomplish things.
  - GPerson 16d ago
    It’s not a joke. My goals in life were all based around developing mastery for a meaningful purpose, and now there’s no need. What keeps me going is that at least I have some consumerist goals like understanding consciousness and physics or mathematics.
    - fsniper 16d ago
      Computers can code for you, but it's not a reason to forget about your mastery goals. The printing has been around for ages now, still people master calligraphy.
      - GPerson 16d ago
        Anybody who thinks that way is just in doing so, and I can think that way for 50% of the time, but it’s difficult to maintain that without extrinsic motivators. When the computer can make a more compelling experience of any kind for another person I can’t help but feel my pursuits are not worthwhile.
fsniper 16d ago
I have been using Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Grok (whatever is available) to create esp32 boards. As I am very new into this field, I mostly use them to query about schematics, ICs, routing, kicad, electronic foundations and so on. They are great help and provide me invaluable advice. However It's always better to validate one's result with others. I have many cases where they would provide me catastrophic advice and a second opinion fixed it. It's always fun to get apologies from LLMS. I love it. I'll check the newer models as soon as possible to see how much improvement they provide.
fsniper 16d ago
Seeing many people using AI to prototyping and ordering boards, I am curios if JLCPCB, PCBWAY and the other prototyping services has upticks in their orders. It would be great to see some numbers.
johnboiles 16d ago
Yes! I have made and ordered 3 PCBs with Astra and Autodesk Fusion since the Astra release. First one has arrived and worked great. I especially love how the model can wrangle all the JLC stuff. What a time we live in
- johnboiles 16d ago
  Such a bummer that PCBAs are 2-3x more expensive than they were before 2025.
geooff_ 16d ago
> ...I was not feeling much of an accomplishment, rightfully so. I used to enjoy the learning and the struggle that came with it. I feel this as well.
ksudb 16d ago
[dead]

41 points by jasonpeacock 19d ago

smalltorch 19d ago

Very cool! Can you reveal how much this custom board cost you?

Cyan488 19d ago
> For five fully assembled boards I paid 130 Euros, ordered the E-ink displays from a local shop I built a project board nearly identical to this one a few years ago, and this seems about right. I don't think the displays themselves are included in the 130 euros. They can vary a lot in price depending on spec and supplier.
- a6mzero 16d ago
  Yes indeed. I paid 7.5 euros extra per e-ink display. So it was 33.5 euros per board.
ac29 19d ago
I sent in a larger, slightly more complex board to JLCPCB over the weekend and it was $175 for 5 boards with components and assembly. Shipping, tariffs (ouch), and sales taxes added another ~$100 or so.

Cyan488 19d ago

I built a project nearly identical to this one so knowing the level of complexity required, I'm not surprised it worked. AI is indeed raising the floor. Even simple hobby designs were once out of reach, but now we can "YOLO it and build stuff fast without necessarily knowing about the details" as the author puts it. That said, without experience it's easy to pierce the veil of "simple circuitry" by accident, just like in XKCD: Tasks[1]. Looking at preview of the author's next project at the end of the article, I'm not so sure the same strategy will work. The board is probably two orders of magnitude more complex. Without knowing the circuit details, I see many red flags (randomly placed ics and decoupling, likely wrong length matching, random thick traces indicating lack of foresight on power distribution, backwards connectors, the probably unnecessary use of BGA footprints, etc). [1]: https://xkcd.com/1425/ https://xkcd.com/1425/

ramesh31 19d ago
This seems to fall into the same category I've seen with basically all agent driven software as well. That is to say, "Amazing that someone with no experience could do this, but not interesting at all in its own right". Call me when AI is laying out the next TSMC node.

XRG 19d ago

As someone who does both hardware design (mostly high precision analog electronics) and software engineering, the difference between both fields in AI capability is striking. Models like Fable and Astra can provide lots of interesting insights into the design of specialty electronics when prompted correctly. Yet they can hardly put that knowledge to work if instructed to generate a schematic or lay out a PCB. Of course, for readers here with a solid grasp on how LLM's operate it's not exactly surprising. Still, I feel this is exactly the kind of thing that drives home that the way we reason about (general) intelligence does not map cleanly to LLM operation, no matter how advanced the current models are.

crote 19d ago
If anything, it is surprising that the LLM is so bad at stealing a ready-made RP2350 design! There are plenty of easy-to-find tutorials like [0] and [1] that handhold you through the entire design process, and a simple search will give you dozens of design files for open-source boards. At this level of board complexity you almost have to try to make it completely non-functional, so although it is nice to see it in practice I am not exactly surprised that a LLM with a decent bunch of assistance managed to do it. But there's quite a gap between the equivalent of poorly copying a "Hello World" from StackOverflow and making actual production-ready boards. [0]: https://pip-assets.raspberrypi.com/categories/1214-rp2350/documents/RP-008280-DS-2-hardware-design-with-rp2350.pdf https://pip-assets.raspberrypi.com/categories/1214-rp2350/do... [1]: https://jlcpcb.com/blog/how-to-design-layout-with-rp2350 https://jlcpcb.com/blog/how-to-design-layout-with-rp2350
- genxy 16d ago
  You have to be more specific about what you mean by design. The models are excellent and the netlist and the components along with tradeoffs.
  - akiselev 16d ago
    Design means PCB routing. A schematic is the PCB equivalent to a Mermaid diagram.

crote 19d ago

Would you be willing to share the full design files? Considering most of the PCB is well-trodden territory, it would be quite interesting to see the details what it actually came up with!

sottol 19d ago

I'm still waiting on my order of 15 PCBs done with Sol - a mini-BT-keyboard that I hope will be comparable to the Psion 5 / Gemini PDA ones, using Kailh PG1316S switches. I still need to design and manufacture a housing (I do have a lot of hobbyist experience with this though), but the idea is to have a magsafe-connectable keyboard I can clip onto my Pixel and make use of the new Linux subsystem (or Termux) and do some productive stuff on the go. It's just been manufactured by JLC but not shipped yet. Funny enough, production itself was ~$70, then $80 for shipping, taxes and fees (tarriffs?). Instead of directly generating Kicad, I chose to let it write "generators" in Python that output Kicad (S-Exps!) pcb and project - with mixed results - but I can generate a version with/without per-key Neopixels and customize certain parts of the board, including debug-stuff. I also _think_ this makes it easier to resume working on this in new sessions but not sure. Otoh, I never actually looked at the Python (vibed...) so it's still a lot of hard-coding. I also landed on and used KicadRoutingTools after trying FreeRouting, combined with some minimal "auto-placing" code for larger ICs and such that are placed with certain constraints. My routing runs are way slower though - on the order of minutes. I always wanted to try atopile - that might be a good match for AI/PCB work. The only thing that really held me back was the lack of routing.

ac29 19d ago
> I always wanted to try atopile - that might be a good match for AI/PCB work. Unfortunately all public open source work halted 6 months ago and they pivoted to a browser based IDE product to monetize: https://atopile.io/blog/atopile-v16 https://atopile.io/blog/atopile-v16
- sottol 19d ago
  Thanks :(
- ost-ing 16d ago
  I followed them for a while before the AI craze started. It looked promising back then, but I wasnt willing to invest time and attention back then on something so new. Good thing I didn’t
19d ago

seveibar 16d ago

AI is exceptionally good at RP2040/RP2350/ESP32-based boards, we've ordered ~15 unique designs, mostly RP2040-based that were designed and autorouted with AI using tscircuit and usually OpenAI models. Currently the major mistakes that AI makes: 1) Improperly rotated connectors (backwards USB port) 2) Endless routing loops for complex boards 3) Really huge/unreadable single page schematics I'm extremely bullish on AI for PCB design, but there is a huge, huge tooling gap. We basically need to soup up all our collective design rule checks so that AI can work in corrective loops. It needs to check for things like "opamp schematic layout conventional" and "trace width closely matches reference design for chip". One thing that makes me super excited is supply-chain resiliency when chip/subcircuit-swapping becomes super easy

smart_asslop 16d ago
[flagged]
cushychicken 16d ago
I’ve found that codifying design rules as skills is a major help in this area.
crote 16d ago
Those are "reinvent the world" level of changes. We're talking about an industry where nothing is standardized, and you want to rely on highly formalized documentation!? I'm not exaggerating when I say that "which way is up" is an unsolved problem right now. Getting the industry to adopt a standardized manufacturing file format and standardized files describing things like footprints and pinouts would be a massive breakthrough. Let's start with that.
- seveibar 14d ago
  Standardization is extremely unlikely, chip manufacturers won't/haven't made a major effort here and having spoken with some, they don't want to. It is much easier and more feasible at this point to do automated visual analysis against the footprint and discovered photos from the internet

N_Lens 16d ago

The machine designed the circuit board in two hours, which was impressive, and the human understood it in never, which is becoming traditional.

brotchie 16d ago

This LED star PCB was 95% generated by Codex: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8a52LjovhcE https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8a52LjovhcE Was non-trivial (e.g. days and days of cumulative work) but worked with Codex to build up a parametric generator where I could adjust the star size, number of rings, leds per ring. It did all the LED-to-LED routing, panel layout with mouse bites, placed decoupling caps. At the time Codex wasn't as good at spatial reasoning, I expect that Astra would do this much faster. 4 x layer PCB with GND and 5V inner layers. WS2816B LEDs (not available in strips yet). 3D printed a frame so that two stars could be opposite each other (video shows only one side). ESP32 S3 on a 3.3v to 5v shifter board sandwiched in between. ESP32 wifi antenna pokes through and sits on a keep out section. Received control signals from a central controller via ESP Now.

hxsbsnbdbs 16d ago
Not to diminish your work, but this looks fairly trivial What exactly did the LLM do, write a generic generator for stars of different size and number of rays?

muglug 16d ago

Bought to us by Fable 5 and the more-experienced colleague who foresaw potential issues.

yitchelle 16d ago
Human in the loop.

BlackRabbit1 16d ago

If it's functional: that's a breakthrough. But: the PCB itself is not looking beautiful in terms of routing and a lot of schematic details yet. Horrible to to be more honest. But that's a minor issue. I'm not overly shocked. 90% of creating PCBs is copying reference schematics from vendor datasheets and connecting them. That's LLM territory. This mostly failed for now as they just did pdf2text and killed all documents. The last 10% are brutal (HF, EMC, high frequency multi-layer designs, etc.). But I managed LLMs to automatically create ngspice models using vision onto datasheets.. lol

akiselev 16d ago
Shameless plug for the slop coded CLI I use in my workflow: https://github.com/akiselev/datasheet-cli https://github.com/akiselev/datasheet-cli It just sends the PDF to Gemini Flash and asks it to extract semi structured data (semi structured in the sense that it's not fully structured extraction, but its a JSON file to feed into the next step of the LLM design process). Works pretty well in general, though I should update to the latest Gemini version.
- CamperBob2 16d ago
  That's pretty cool! How reliable has the footprint extraction been?
  - SuperMouse 16d ago
    I tested it With Gemini 2.5 Flash. Works great.

helsinkiandrew 16d ago

> Upon Claude's compilation of the project, I asked it to prepare the required files for JLCPCB, and tell me what to select on their GUI It would be an interesting step to get Claude (or other LLM) to do order the PCBs itself on the JLCPCB website. We're nearly at the stage where you can describe what a device should do, let it design the circuit (using available components on JLCPCB), design a PCB and enclosure then order PCBs, assembly and 3d printed enclosure and get it sent to you for final assembly.

ofrzeta 16d ago
There's a plugin for Kicad https://github.com/bouni/kicad-jlcpcb-tools https://github.com/bouni/kicad-jlcpcb-tools

Rival67 16d ago

I've been working on several PCB projects, and agents are very helpful for automating many parts of the workflow. They're excellent for schematics. Complex routing, though, is still a human's job for now; I've watched Freerouting fall on its face many times. If you're doing six-layer high-speed DDR routing, AI won't solve that for you today. However checkout EDA tools https://github.com/l3wi/claude-eda/ https://github.com/l3wi/claude-eda/ https://github.com/drandyhaas/KiCadRoutingTools https://github.com/drandyhaas/KiCadRoutingTools

amelius 16d ago
That layout does not look very good: https://github.com/drandyhaas/KiCadRoutingTools/blob/main/docs/routed_all.png https://github.com/drandyhaas/KiCadRoutingTools/blob/main/do... I'm curious if this even works at high speed though I'm seeing what appears to be length-matched traces. Is the tool using an EM simulator in the process?
- tonyarkles 16d ago
  I've installed it this morning to play around with on some low-speed designs before trying a high-speed design. Looking at that specific screenshot you posted there... that looks partially like a floor planning problem to me. Looking up the part number, that Ti90G529 is an FPGA, which also suggests that the overall routing could potentially get a lot better if the pads from the part on the left-hand side were shifted to all be on the "top" or "bottom" of U3 instead of divided across it the way it is right now. My first attempt on a low-speed not-dense board came out OK. There were a few odd choices, but I don't expect perfection from auto-routers. If nothing else, auto-routers are a good way to double-check that your floor planning is OK, even if you then rip up the auto-routed traces and hand route them instead.

kanwisher 16d ago

Yeah I've built about a dozen boards using GPT-sol 5.6 and my favorite is my Pi CM5 carrier board, to replace a laptop board in an old Sony Vaio p laptop. https://x.com/kanwisher/status/2089629411364745351?s=20 https://x.com/kanwisher/status/2089629411364745351?s=20

EastMakes 16d ago
Did it work ? It's funny, I made a CM5 board for my N40L not too long ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzW4rRsD8Uk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzW4rRsD8Uk Was sol5.6 good enough to do the actual HDMI / PCI-E and USB 3 Routing ?

ZuLuuuuuu 16d ago

In our company, we are doing high speed PCB designs with FPGAs, memories, ADCs, DACs etc. We are not yet using AI much in our PCB design workflow because our designs seem to be too complex for the AI solutions we have tried. Are there any areas where people are successfully incorporating AI to their PCB design workflow, even with complex, high speed designs? Schematic/layout review? Routing? Footprint creation?

amelius 16d ago
Why wouldn't an LLM be able to do high speed designs? Are you inventing new types of design rules for every board? Or is it simply because the automatic layout tools are not up to the task yet?
- ZuLuuuuuu 16d ago
  It is just that the current tools out there seem to work for small or hobbyist boards currently. We couldn't apply them on our complex board designs. But maybe you had a different experience? I am curious on what kind of ways big companies are incorporating AI in their PCB design workflows currently.
- sampullman 16d ago
  The feedback loop is too long, it's not like a software development harness that can direct the model to write some tests for complex behavior, and iterate until they pass. There a lots of things that can be subtly wrong, and it gets much worse as your signal frequency increases, or you have to deal with high power/radio/etc. The model (agent) has no way to validate its work.

PowerElectronix 16d ago

Yeah, we're still very far from a machine routing PCBs. Nice project, though, looks pretty fun to do it with an AI.

a6mzero 16d ago
I researched a bit on how to manufacture PCBs at home, and i came across Voltera V one. The price is indeed way too high, but I am hoping somebody will make a foss version of it. There are already pretty interesting foss PnP machines.
- PowerElectronix 16d ago
  For a 2-layer pcb I would either go chemical etching or a small routing cnc. Chemical etching kits , uv lamps and blank pcbs are not "too" expensive, but it's more of a professional setup than a hobbyist. Just think of all the PCBs yoi can send to manufacture (and with 4 layers and more) for the price of even getting half the stuff.
  - Palomides 16d ago
    real PCBs are so much better than anything you can do at home, and so cheap, and so easy to order now, it's just not worth it
    - PowerElectronix 16d ago
      For a small lab where you have a moderate volume of oneoffs it's worth the investment. But, yeah, I wouldn't have that setup at home.
- PunchyHamster 16d ago
  At current PCB prices that's kinda not worth it. Hell, even actual assembly isn't that expensive (at least if you have "a lot of few components" vs "big variety of components").
lnsru 16d ago

applfanboysbgon 16d ago

> That said, I was not feeling much of an accomplishment, rightfully so. I used to enjoy the learning and the struggle that came with it. > Yes it does suck that the joy we had while building has been sucked out of us > For my hobby projects tho, I will continue to YOLO it and build stuff fast without necessarily knowing about the details. I don't understand this conclusion. LLMs sucked the joy out of it, didn't feel rewarding, you're forced to use them at work, so you decide... just keep doing it at home, too? Why not actually learn to build a proper PCB knowing you can do much better than this horrible (despite being dead-simple) board that only got there with the help of your expert colleague's guidance anyways? Don't succumb to utter laziness and deny yourself the satisfaction of learning new skills, that's letting the thing rot your brain out worse than any TV ever did.

a6mzero 16d ago
You are right. What I meant in my conclusion was more about : "I will use these tools to generate parts of a project I don't necessarily care about." I already started learning about proper PCB design, and I am actively fighting against choosing an LLM instead of grasping a concept fully. It's something I am struggling with, but all this is new for most of us. Hoping I will find a good balance at the end. Thanks for your remarks :)
- applfanboysbgon 16d ago
  Fair enough. I think there is great value to using LLMs to assist in learning new hobbies, helping lessen the friction, and doing research. I just think it's sad if you let them replace your thinking completely instead of augmenting it. Cheers for the human-written blog post, I did enjoy reading it.
  - a6mzero 16d ago
    Thank you :) That means a lot to me.
    - tonyarkles 16d ago

wasabinator 16d ago

I saw the board cost, but how about the total cost in tokens to design it? Can empathise with the good and meh feeling you got from it. For me I try to stick with manual struggles with new concepts which grows my brain and allows me learn something new. But its impressive what LLMs can do.

a6mzero 16d ago
I am on Max 5x plan, so there were no additional costs. But the would-be API cost was around 450 usd.

amelius 16d ago

Can it shop autonomously on LCSC? Is it allowed to?

nullc 16d ago

It's pretty interesting to watch an LLM drive ngspice. ... clearly an area that could use more training, but good enough to make it less annoying for me to use.

kgwgk 16d ago

[The] Title Butcher strikes again! "PCB is brought to you by Fable 5" is pretty different from "This PCB is brought to you by Fable 5". Maybe you could do "PCB brought to you by Fable 5" if you are really against articles? Let's have a Fable 5 censorship agent or something...

negative_zero 16d ago

Now get it through compliance :)

_fizz_buzz_ 16d ago

I have used fable to aid me with PCB design. It is pretty good. But it can also sometimes make very human mistakes. It mixed up RX and TX on a uart line. If you don't catch stuff like that and get assembled boards this can obviously be pretty annoying. On the other hand I have also mixed up RX and TX before, lol.

PunchyHamster 16d ago
I feel like just leaving PCB routing and schematics for it is just waste of tokens. Once you have initial design (what chips to use, what each of them needs in terms of other components etc.) the schematic/PCB isn't the hard part but it is the hard part for the AI. It's great at stuff that humans take a lot of time like say "get me buck converters in that range of voltage in power, and put price of chip and supporting components in the table", and at least in not heavily analog designs, finding chips that fit the purpose, are available and in price range is good part of the work

NichoPaolucci 16d ago

Props on the build - bespoke tooling like this per human is a really cool timeline to live in. Personal tech. Related - Apparently this website is also "Brought to you by Fable"! It's very interesting how this occurs with any "website builder" - Squarespace, Wordpress, Wix... and now Claude + GPT! The elements look like every powerpoint I've seen in the last 6 months. Every report. Every internal document. It's all converged with similar typesetting, image / diagram placement... To me, the verbiage is the big one, this time, where it takes all the personality out of a site and essentially devoids it of any meaning. I am NOT saying that this post is AI generated (it very likely isn't), but a site that has all of those qualities is useless to me and devoid of any meaning, repulsive actually.

varispeed 16d ago

> I was not feeling much of an accomplishment, Why is this even required? I'll never understand this mindset. Because something came "easy", doesn't mean you haven't done anything meaningful to do it. I'd say there is more people that you can count that wouldn't be able to do this task even if the AI was literally guiding them by hand.

the__alchemist 16d ago

Hey - I ordered a board yesterday. I used Opus 5, Astra, and Sol at points to QC the board, and offer power routing advice. (The MCU is a brand new one, and poorly documented unless they send you an NDA and the full docs). Those models were not capable of even schematic editing or building. (I didn't bother with routing or placement). They made gross errors all over the schematic; changed the known-working parts and net routing I'd copy+pasted from previous boards, changed I2C to SPI for no reason, and generally produced an unusable, unreadable result. Overlapping symbols and labels etc.

Neywiny 16d ago
What do you mean by power routing for an MCU? Like they wanted to fatten the traces or what?
- the__alchemist 16d ago
  It's an Atmosic Atm3430e, which includes RF energy harvesting. So, I'm using 3 power sources depending on the application: Coin cell, USB, and RF, with a 1v8 net for sensors. Its power pin routing has some particulars that are poorly documented, and there are no publicly available reference designs. There are a few design docs which help, but leave open questions. So, I used LLMs to help me figure out which pins to connect to which. They did not seem capable of actually doing the work directly, but they answered my questions. We will see how correctly in a few weeks... Also used LLMs to try to figure out how to flash/debug it. The setup I normally use (Tac-Connect ST-Link 6 pin + Probe-rs) won't work here; it's cortex-m, but their official guides indicate they want you do use a Segger J-Link, which I'm not ready to pay for at this point. It is a very expensive thing. So I'm going to try an NXP MCU-Link Pro. The St-Linkv3 I've been using will likely not work.
  - Neywiny 16d ago
    ?? I found the schematic here https://atmosic.com/products_kit_atmevk-3430e-yqn/ https://atmosic.com/products_kit_atmevk-3430e-yqn/ Is this not it? They even have the .pcb file if you download the full board doc which I believe is everything you need. This is a lot more than I thought you'd have to work with given your description. Full schematic, user guides, datasheet

GPerson 16d ago

It honestly just makes me think there’s little reason for me to be alive anymore.

fsniper 16d ago
I hope this is a joke and you really don't consider this as such. It's in fact opening up too many opportunities to us humans. It's never been this easy to acquire information and accomplish things.
- GPerson 16d ago
  It’s not a joke. My goals in life were all based around developing mastery for a meaningful purpose, and now there’s no need. What keeps me going is that at least I have some consumerist goals like understanding consciousness and physics or mathematics.
  - fsniper 16d ago
    Computers can code for you, but it's not a reason to forget about your mastery goals. The printing has been around for ages now, still people master calligraphy.
    - GPerson 16d ago
      Anybody who thinks that way is just in doing so, and I can think that way for 50% of the time, but it’s difficult to maintain that without extrinsic motivators. When the computer can make a more compelling experience of any kind for another person I can’t help but feel my pursuits are not worthwhile.

fsniper 16d ago

I have been using Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Grok (whatever is available) to create esp32 boards. As I am very new into this field, I mostly use them to query about schematics, ICs, routing, kicad, electronic foundations and so on. They are great help and provide me invaluable advice. However It's always better to validate one's result with others. I have many cases where they would provide me catastrophic advice and a second opinion fixed it. It's always fun to get apologies from LLMS. I love it. I'll check the newer models as soon as possible to see how much improvement they provide.

fsniper 16d ago

Seeing many people using AI to prototyping and ordering boards, I am curios if JLCPCB, PCBWAY and the other prototyping services has upticks in their orders. It would be great to see some numbers.

johnboiles 16d ago

Yes! I have made and ordered 3 PCBs with Astra and Autodesk Fusion since the Astra release. First one has arrived and worked great. I especially love how the model can wrangle all the JLC stuff. What a time we live in

johnboiles 16d ago
Such a bummer that PCBAs are 2-3x more expensive than they were before 2025.

geooff_ 16d ago

> ...I was not feeling much of an accomplishment, rightfully so. I used to enjoy the learning and the struggle that came with it. I feel this as well.

ksudb 16d ago

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