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Show HN: BoardMint – upload a PCB, get a standards-backed issue report in ~30s (boardmint.io)

4 points by pranavchahal ↗ HN
Hi HN, I’m Pranav (founder). I design hardware and kept seeing a weird split: Engineers don’t trust AI to design full PCBs (hidden assumptions, stackups, manufacturing constraints, EMI/return paths, and the cost of being even slightly wrong - why tools like Flux still aren’t widely trusted for full designs). But customers keep asking ChatGPT to “review” boards. They paste screenshots/Gerbers and expect a real sign-off. It often sounds right, but it can hallucinate or miss what actually causes respins. Lesson building this: the hard part isn’t more AI, it’s deterministic, reproducible detection with explicit assumptions, with AI only to explain findings and suggest fixes. Would love critique: what’s worth catching pre-fab, what’s too noisy, and what would make you trust this as a release gate.

2 comments

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phendrenad2
Well it sounds good, on paper. The site makes some bold claims. I'd like to see more about how you're doing the various checks. I can imagine how you'd do an impedance check using either an external tool, or an LLM directly. I'd show more examples of real-world boards and the things the AI caught. And, good luck!
pranavchahal
Fair point, I agree. I put together a more detailed technical write-up here on how the checks are done, where AI is used, and where it explicitly isn’t: https://boardmint.io/posts/tech There’s also a sample report on a real board in there. And I’ve been running real boards through it pretty regularly to see what’s genuinely useful in practice, so if you have something you’d want me to test, feel free to share it. Happy to run it and post the output.