Comment by SequoiaHope
4 hours ago
I have 15+ years of PCB design experience. Mostly hobby stuff but a fair amount of processional work. Kilowatt range brushless motor controllers, basic RF stuff, lots of microcontroller stuff.
I had Fable design an LED earring. Rechargeable coin cell, RP2350 cpu, IMU, 45 addressable LEDs. It made two mistakes - missed the through holes on the coin cell holder footprint and made the center pad too small. I was able to have JLC swap the through hole battery holder for a surface mount one, and I put a little solder on the small center pad to make it stick up above the mask. They work great! It took 6 days of Fable usage, so about $50 on my Max plan. Very cheap for hardware dev.
I was sufficiently impressed that I’ve been going over old circuit board designs. Some half finished, some completed but in need of a next rev, and I’m getting so much done.
To see it hit the mainstream like the OpenAI announcement, I think big things are coming for this world and by and large they are not ready for it.
For my part, I have always loved PCB design and layout but I simply can’t keep up with the amount of labor required to build what I want, so I welcome this change.
I have also begun exploring more advanced algorithms for PCB manipulation. I have a fairly dense board that needs a few more small chips added. I have an algorithm now that can kinda shuffle and jostle things around so you take up all the spare microns of space across a region of the board and make openings to squeeze a little more in there. It’s pretty cool to see the visualizations as I have it generate movies of the component drift. I foresee much more powerful tools like this in the future.
One tip: have it make a project web page with a chronological list of big changes and detailed visualizations for everything that happens. I can actually prompt all of this on my phone while I am out and about, and view the results on a Tailscale served local page. I’ve always wanted to be able to do PCB design when away from home and now I can!
As someone without PCB design experience but with dreams of physical things that could be made with PCBs this sounds amazing. What software are you using for the PCB design? Or just entirely letting Fable do whatever and checking the work with the browser page you mention?
The designs are in Kicad format, and the Kicad APIs are useful for Claude to work with. I would say that right now this involves a lot of knowledge about PCB design to do well, or for more detailed designs. However you might research how to design board for fabrication at JLCPCB and try something simple. Eg make a board with only LEDs in some pretty pattern and make it so you solder a raspberry pi Pico 2 to the board to drive it. Then you don’t have to worry about microcontroller work, just getting the LEDs placed. That is a little easier to get right. Just check the orientation of the LED footprint in the data sheet and make sure the four pins on the LED footprint match - and that there is a silkscreen dot on pin 1 of the LED. You can feed an agent this comment and it can check, though it’s good to check with your own eyes. You might ask it to screenshot the data sheet and the board footprint and display them side by side on the project web page for your review.
Put the LEDs in a cool pattern, slap a Pico on there, have your LLM program it, then dangle it off your backpack with a USB battery pack. Probably adding a motion sensor is easy enough.
Ask the LLM to make sure the board follows JLCPCB’s design rules, lists the LCSC part number for each part, verifies the parts are in stock, double checks every footprint, and makes sure the board passes DRC. Make sure it creates a schematic that is linked to the board design, and that the schematic is properly arranged in to logical blocks with clear connections the way a person would make a schematic - not a big array of parts with global labels for everything. Once it’s done, ask it to clean up the schematic and make it better. Repeat for the board layout. Ask it to review and look for issues multiple times. It will find them. Finally, take some time to doodle your own silkscreen art on there. Have fun! Note the Pico 2 is USB micro. For USB C, sparkfun or waveshare sell similar boards.
Also you can ask it to teach you! Ask a million questions and have it give you multimedia explainers.
It's exciting. How long do you think it's going to be when electrical engineering is mostly going to be about verification of AI designs, and what are the tools out there to enable that?
Electrical engineering will involve humans making specifications for a while the same way we do vibe software engineering today. Board design and layout will change but electrical engineering is about more than that.
For tools, I think the LLMs will outpace companies who built specialized tooling for this over the last couple years. Every six months we will see more progress than we saw in the last few years - for quite some time.
The barrier for me as a hobbyist is always learning the tools. Same for game design. Text is a better interface than learning CAD, KiCAD, Blender, etc. None of those things feel user friendly to people that don’t want to make a career out of it. To the point I usually just jump on fivver and hire someone to do a pair design session. Problem with that is cost sometimes, but also the difficulty of mobilization (find someone, agree on price, align calendars) and also the difficulty of changes because you have mobilize again to some degree, if some time goes by you may not even be able to reach the person. I also find it difficult when I want to do something unusual or non-standard. I usually know what standard is, and have decided I like something else instead, and I don’t really like a human critic of the decision when they don’t understand my reasoning. I find this happens in nearly all design; architects, engineers, etc.
I welcome this opportunity to pivot to a process I can control a bit more without having to really learn the tools.
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So, basically, in a few years, humans say what spectrum a device may operate in, AI figures out how to make it, and humans check that AI didn't fuck up?
Given, say, 4 more years (ie, same as time from initial ChatGPT to today), what level of spec do you think humans will be giving?
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