You joke but my coping saw cuts wood much faster than any of my normal saws. I don't know a lot about saws, I presume it's the type of blade on it. And I do indeed have three saws, which is a lot for someone who doesn't know much about saws. One that says it's good for cutting metal, one for wood and one for tight corners in wood (a coping saw).
Your coping saw probably has a pretty thin and narrow blade. That minimizes friction on the non cutting surface, and the amount of material removed because of the narrow blade.
Flux.ai being the incumbent
Silixon based out of the UK have been showing demos
Quilter and DeepPCB for layout
The recent OpenAI demo...
I went the other way and pre-designed sub circuits with a set of rules that allows simple merge assembly, unfortunately I didn't have the time or budget to continue with it, but I took the constrained approach as with hardware, things can't be 99%.
The one thing I will say, is that my experience of hardware engineers is very gatekeepy.
Any questions about the use of AI for any form of automation on forums/Reddit get shot down instantly and the OP's told 'skill issue' more or less. In my opinion, just as with software, most work is simple and should be automated, there will always be a need for the real engineering when it comes to high specification work, high volume optimisation and hardware debug (although Claude code is pretty handy at driving a Jlink)
> The one thing I will say, is that my experience of hardware engineers is very gatekeepy.
Stay away from Reddit and forums if you want to see where the open minded people are looking. There are a lot of communities where EEs are experimenting with newer technologies and sharing their results, with realistic appraisals of what can be done.
You also need to understand the history of autorouting technology for PCBs. Autorouters with auto layout have been around in many forms for years. Their output never compares to a skilled EE doing it manually. The gap between autorouter output and skilled operator output is even bigger than the gap between a good developer and average AI codegen slop.
I’m interested in this space, but even the Fable/Astra or dedicated tools like Quilter, Flux, and others have a very, very long way to go for boards more complex than simple hobby boards.
I do think this is going to be good for hobby people doing simple PCBs though
> Stay away from Reddit and forums if you want to see where the open minded people are looking. There are a lot of communities where EEs are experimenting with newer technologies and sharing their results, with realistic appraisals of what can be done.
My experience with hardware engineers, at least IRL, is very different. They love to talk about their work. However, I used to be an EE so that probably helps.
As for Reddit, there's a lot of "bury head in sand and problem will go away" behavior when it comes to AI. People are understandably worried about their jobs, but they're certainly not doing themselves any favors by downplaying AI or looking for "tech niches where AI isn't yet."
Copperhead is very interesting. I do some embedded systems consulting on the side, but I've never enjoyed PCB layout very much. I briefly investigated using AI for it the last time I had to do a board, but it wasn't very helpful.
Thing is, what can they realistically do? Any work that does not involve a social component is on the way out. All work that remains will be more like "service" than like "work" the way we see it today ("service" as in "civil service", not as in "held in service or labor", i hope).
I do not have experience with Copperhead, but I made 2 PCBs with Claude. He made a py script that generates Kicad sources, I ended up generating all files (in particular schematics and PCB) from a shared netlist, and use Kicad cli to validate and generate gerbers.
I manufactured both PCBs via PCBWay (Claude also red all the specs and configured the constraints accordingly) and both work. I'm pretty impressed, especially because I've never done a PCB myself and didn't know I could.
What I was doing manually, co-working with Claude, was placing and routing (I was doing those via Kicad, then saving, then Claude was re-importing my work in his py files).
I recommend having the LLM write Skidl, which generates a netlist, which you import in the PCB editor, which the LLM then reviews. Routing itself I think would require code-driven routing (expressing board via layout constraints, kinda like UI constraints/CSS) which does not exist yet.
It seems like this is just controlling KiCad. Assuming this produces a BOM as well, you could take the output files, send them to a board house like PCBWay or JLPCB and get the boards stuffed and shipped to you.
The board houses may have questions for you that may be difficult for you to answer, but theoretically you could answer those with AI and get fully assembled boards delivered right to your doorstep.
Look at jlcpcb or other Chinese assembly houses. If you stay within their component library it is dead easy, just upload your gerber and BOM, and you can have assembled boards within a week or so. Slightly more difficult if they have to order parts for your BOM, but still not really that hard.
if I needed something on the board that was outside the component library of the assembly house, can I ship it to them? or have them arrange for it somehow? How constrained is the component library?
I did that with Codex+Sol alone, and made something even more complex in less time with Codex+Astra over the weekend.
Its maybe more hands on than you want it to be, but you mostly just need to supervise the work. But yes, the CAD outputs go directly to the JLCPCB ordering form, or whereever you fab
With AI enabled consumer hardware usecases going to explode this is something super relevant. At least 5 startups have pitched their wearables to me and they could definitely use this
Design for Manufacturability (DFM) will determine if they generate a viable product. Hardware is difficult, with a success rate around 1:66 for a startup.
It is a good idea to consult with a contract manufacturer engineering team early, and stop wasting peoples time including their own.
I have also seen people re-brand China pad-printed generic products, and claim they needed investor help buying a shipping container full of cheap stuff or outright e-waste. Careful, especially if you see multiple versions or the same product pop up at the same time. Best of luck =3
Will it though? Do you think people will actually be more creative with this or will we get yet another e-ink device with a slightly different form factor, or a "less than a phone" with different constraints?
In the end is the PCB design the bottleneck to create new devices or is it mostly about available components and their price?
PCB design is no bottleneck. These services are solutions in search of a problem.
There are already millions of vendors all over the world making infinite variations of PCB designs for the same/similar product.
Ultimately the bottleneck is the consumer does not care for infinite variations. The vast majority just want a "top rated product" at the lowest price. Which is whatever Amazon sorts their results as or whateelver the Jones are buying.
This is probably not the primary way people use the tool, but if I log in (desktop, Chrome on macOS), click "Start a board" on the sidebar, and go to click any of the inputs, I can't type text in them (the inputs are "Start from an example", "What are you building", and "The brief".
If you scroll down they want you to "Connect copperhead to GitHub first." The bottom should have a page where you can give them access to a repo for handling stuff.
The website is the marketing for the product, most people see that first, and they wont go further if your front door is festooned with goofball stuff.
Software moves so fast that its actually an anti feature. Libraries and SDKs measure lifetime support in years, but industrial hardware support *at minimum* is a decade. A lot of these new startups dont understand that established industry wont use them unless they known this shiny new system wont ve abandoned in a few years.
On the other hand, softwate devs trying to quickly make a product have something to get them going.
Why would somebody ever use a hosted version? I see
"One-click gerber, DXF/STEP, render and BOM export" and "Altium support beyond KiCad" in cloud plans, dunno if they are compelling.
Please don't post shallow dismissals or focus on trivialities. Let's focus on the substance of the project. It's a good sign that an early stage project hasn't devoted a lot of time or cost into their logo.
I'm sorry, but going on that website made me feel like I was being greeted by an AI support assistant or recruiter.
I understand—these days, there are more reasons to vibe a landing page than not. To many, however, this page is going to be their first encounter with the project. While it sure is shallow to judge a book solely by its cover, in this case, the cover just blatantly screams "we haven't even tried"... Can you really blame the people for not looking beyond it if its own creator gave it a similar amount of attention?
We just need you to observe the guidelines, no matter the topic or no matter how much it seems justifiable to overlook them in a particular case. They've been largely constant for nearly 20 years, and HN only continues to be a place where people want to discuss important topics because we have guidelines and uphold them daily. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
There will always be a range of views about whether an article is good or not; there's no universal definition of “low quality submission”. HN’s ethos is to surface content that “gratifies intellectual curiosity”. Often we only really know whether an article fits that description once we see the discussion thread. You're welcome to flag submissions you think are not fit for HN, or to email hn@ycombinator.com to point out why an article is unfit for the front page. And you can make a substantive comment critiquing the article.
They have similar names, seem to solve similar problems and both have first commit within a few days in July. One is Python and the other Typescript though and they don't seem to be forks.
Many of the new agentic electronic design tools are KiCad-based, which is fine, but for people creating new EDA tools I'd encourage them to take a look at tscircuit (open-source, MIT). KiCad wasn't built for AI-gen with things like automatic routing/placement, supplier footprint orientation checking, connector orientation checking and other features that will be required as more people expect extensive validation for AI-generated designs. KiCad could add these things, but they've got decades of baggage and many Altium features to pull in. I'm worried that we're all getting bound by KiCad s-exprs
Just regular coding agents are really good with Skidl schematics and can review layouts well. I'm not sure why you'd want a specialised environment for this.
While this new competency of LLMs in EDA is objectively neat, I can't help but feel a little sad about the way this is going. Electronics projects are my refuge from the new hyper-speed low-quality software world. I want to "just not use it" and continue to enjoy electronics, but if I ever want to turn one of my ideas into a product, I'll be up against people who are building extremely quickly and to a lower quality standard. Yes, potential users of a cool new gadget care about having their problems solved above all else, but I can tell this is going to turn into another field we're all here saying "what happened to craft?" about, and idk, I just don't like it. And this is coming from someone who enjoys (turn by turn) LLM-boosted programming.
Goal is to make it easy for users to remix circuits, like say you want to make a mod for a retro video game system, you can fork off of an existing mod and just change it, and we guide you through getting it printed at pcbway or jlcpcb.
How reliable was the re-import step? Once you’d placed and routed things manually in KiCad, could you ask Claude for another change without it disturbing that work? Did you need to explicitly mark which parts should stay untouched?
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[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 10.8 ms ] threadFlux.ai being the incumbent Silixon based out of the UK have been showing demos Quilter and DeepPCB for layout The recent OpenAI demo...
I went the other way and pre-designed sub circuits with a set of rules that allows simple merge assembly, unfortunately I didn't have the time or budget to continue with it, but I took the constrained approach as with hardware, things can't be 99%.
The one thing I will say, is that my experience of hardware engineers is very gatekeepy.
Any questions about the use of AI for any form of automation on forums/Reddit get shot down instantly and the OP's told 'skill issue' more or less. In my opinion, just as with software, most work is simple and should be automated, there will always be a need for the real engineering when it comes to high specification work, high volume optimisation and hardware debug (although Claude code is pretty handy at driving a Jlink)
Stay away from Reddit and forums if you want to see where the open minded people are looking. There are a lot of communities where EEs are experimenting with newer technologies and sharing their results, with realistic appraisals of what can be done.
You also need to understand the history of autorouting technology for PCBs. Autorouters with auto layout have been around in many forms for years. Their output never compares to a skilled EE doing it manually. The gap between autorouter output and skilled operator output is even bigger than the gap between a good developer and average AI codegen slop.
I’m interested in this space, but even the Fable/Astra or dedicated tools like Quilter, Flux, and others have a very, very long way to go for boards more complex than simple hobby boards.
I do think this is going to be good for hobby people doing simple PCBs though
Where are these communities?
As for Reddit, there's a lot of "bury head in sand and problem will go away" behavior when it comes to AI. People are understandably worried about their jobs, but they're certainly not doing themselves any favors by downplaying AI or looking for "tech niches where AI isn't yet."
Copperhead is very interesting. I do some embedded systems consulting on the side, but I've never enjoyed PCB layout very much. I briefly investigated using AI for it the last time I had to do a board, but it wasn't very helpful.
I manufactured both PCBs via PCBWay (Claude also red all the specs and configured the constraints accordingly) and both work. I'm pretty impressed, especially because I've never done a PCB myself and didn't know I could.
What I was doing manually, co-working with Claude, was placing and routing (I was doing those via Kicad, then saving, then Claude was re-importing my work in his py files).
The board houses may have questions for you that may be difficult for you to answer, but theoretically you could answer those with AI and get fully assembled boards delivered right to your doorstep.
Look at jlcpcb or other Chinese assembly houses. If you stay within their component library it is dead easy, just upload your gerber and BOM, and you can have assembled boards within a week or so. Slightly more difficult if they have to order parts for your BOM, but still not really that hard.
Go look at the library, I can’t really tell you if it is constrained for your use case.
Its maybe more hands on than you want it to be, but you mostly just need to supervise the work. But yes, the CAD outputs go directly to the JLCPCB ordering form, or whereever you fab
It is a good idea to consult with a contract manufacturer engineering team early, and stop wasting peoples time including their own.
I have also seen people re-brand China pad-printed generic products, and claim they needed investor help buying a shipping container full of cheap stuff or outright e-waste. Careful, especially if you see multiple versions or the same product pop up at the same time. Best of luck =3
In the end is the PCB design the bottleneck to create new devices or is it mostly about available components and their price?
There are already millions of vendors all over the world making infinite variations of PCB designs for the same/similar product.
Ultimately the bottleneck is the consumer does not care for infinite variations. The vast majority just want a "top rated product" at the lowest price. Which is whatever Amazon sorts their results as or whateelver the Jones are buying.
I've imagined a chip running as slow as python.
"Nothing commits without its gate."
Software moves so fast that its actually an anti feature. Libraries and SDKs measure lifetime support in years, but industrial hardware support *at minimum* is a decade. A lot of these new startups dont understand that established industry wont use them unless they known this shiny new system wont ve abandoned in a few years.
On the other hand, softwate devs trying to quickly make a product have something to get them going.
I tested over the weekend and Astra can
- create and modify schematics from instructions - place components and route traces
out of the box, just via normal 'computer use'. I'm not satisfied with the routing but it isn't terrible.
Yes yes, I know, leagues apart. Still though... One can dream.
I understand—these days, there are more reasons to vibe a landing page than not. To many, however, this page is going to be their first encounter with the project. While it sure is shallow to judge a book solely by its cover, in this case, the cover just blatantly screams "we haven't even tried"... Can you really blame the people for not looking beyond it if its own creator gave it a similar amount of attention?
https://github.com/deadbringer17/Copperbrain
They have similar names, seem to solve similar problems and both have first commit within a few days in July. One is Python and the other Typescript though and they don't seem to be forks.
Goal is to make it easy for users to remix circuits, like say you want to make a mod for a retro video game system, you can fork off of an existing mod and just change it, and we guide you through getting it printed at pcbway or jlcpcb.