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Comment by knicholes

8 hours ago

I tried making a button using Claude entirely (including the 3D printed enclosure) and it effed up pretty hard with the traces and the header spacing. The project was a big red arcade button that plays the "ah-my-groin.mp3" when pushed (from Simpsons). It did cool work on saving battery life, and the 3d enclosure was awesome, but yeah, I'm convinced I'd have to do another version or two of the custom chip until it came back right. I used a Blender MCP for the 3d modeling. I used a KiCAD MCP server for the chip design/validation.

I think we're not there yet. I've been meaning to look at this flux.ai to see if it has the prompts/workflow worked out better than what I was able to cobble together in a few hours. Maybe Alteryx's MCP server would have been better. I'll try that this weekend for another board I've got.

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knicholes

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Aurornis  7 hours ago

> I tried making a button using Claude entirely (including the 3D printed enclosure) and it effed up pretty hard with the traces and the header spacing.

PCB design and 3D CAD design are different topics.

Hardware Description Languages are closer to programming languages than CAD. Look at some Verilog to get an idea - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verilog

  • knicholes  7 hours ago

    Right. KiCAD for PCB design. Blender for 3D CAD. Oh, are you saying I should have used something other than the KiCAD MCP server for better results?

    • VorpalWay  5 hours ago

      Designing circuit board and 3D models (even using something like OpenSCAD) is a very spatial process today. You are dealing with coordinates one way or another.

      This is very unlike how FPGA and (I assume) ASIC is done. That is more like a traditional programming language but everything happens all at once (no sequence of statements outside tests, if you need that you have to write a state machine yourself). You define logic expressions between signal, add stateful latches, etc. But you never specify the physical layout.

      Instead you feed your description to a tool that acts a constraint solver/optimiser that computes the layout for you (this is for FPGAs called synthesising IIRC, it is akin to a compiler). Typically quite slow, even for small circuts like we did at university it took minutes, and for large circuits it might easily days.

      Now, this raises the question, what if you design a PCB net list using AI, but then use traditional autorouting and layout? I believe that can also be done, but I have no experience designing PCBs, so I don't know how well it works.

    • quadrature  7 hours ago

      VHDL is not a language for spatial design. Its more akin to a programming language with circuit semantics.

    • dcrazy  7 hours ago

      They’re saying that VHDL is an entirely different concept than physical modeling.

    • cwillu  6 hours ago

      Meta: can we not downvote people who are clarifying what they're saying and asking questions, even if they're wrong about something, if the content isn't otherwise objectionable?

      5 replies →

    • tamimio  7 hours ago

      One (kicad) make the board, the other (blender) make the casing for it. Both are “hardware” but is electronics and the other is mechanical. Electronic one AI can do a good job, I can’t wait for it to fully built the whole circuit for you based on your specs.

rpcope1  6 hours ago

PCB layout is an art, and doesn't seem to map well to LLMs (I tried for shits and giggles recently). Claude in general, kind of like code, does a lot of redundant belt and suspenders stuff in the schematics it generates (if it can generate them at all). It's one of those things that's really not there yet outside of the simplest designs.