news.ycombinator.com

Untitled

SequoiaHope · 0 points · 0 comments · 5. Sept.

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!

Comments

5 preview comments · loading full thread
zorm5. Sept.

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?

varenc6. Sept.

> I think big things are coming for this world and by and large they are not ready for it. With regard to PCB design, I'm curious if can you add more color to how the world isn't ready for this in particular? I don't think I quite grasp all the ramifications of AI becoming PCB design experts.

a2ff6eeb05. Sept.

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?

peter_retief5. Sept.

It is very hard work and with multilayer boards and surface mount components it is not really a hobby for me anymore, maybe with AI it can be again?

m3kw95. Sept.

same with software, it came fast, but we was ready. The leverge is high but it still does not have much "taste" in design. Ask it to design something, they enter a pattern. They can get it right but is the same pattern, if it's wrong they will repeat it similarly.