LLMs and KiCad

[jcpst]

Looks like some pretty big leaps in automated PCB design. Makes me wonder if it will generate a whole new crop of YATS peddlers peddling their pedals, similar to the pandemic boom.

Can AI design circuit boards yet?

A look at what current models can build, where they fail, and how EEBench tests the electronics in simulation.

eebench.org

 

[Big Monk]

Looks like some pretty big leaps in automated PCB design. Makes me wonder if it will generate a whole new crop of YATS peddlers peddling their pedals, similar to the pandemic boom.

Can AI design circuit boards yet?

A look at what current models can build, where they fail, and how EEBench tests the electronics in simulation.

eebench.org

Real ones know this is bullshit.

PCB design is one of the most fun aspects of designing and building pedals.

At this point, it’s almost a form of therapy.

 

[jessenator]

PCB design is one of the most fun aspects of designing and building pedals.

Agree. It's a puzzle/challenge that I can actually get behind.

 

[jcpst]

That right there touches the fundamental rub. If you know what you’re doing, then you can use it to develop quicker. If you know what you’re doing, it’s because you put in the work and like doing it. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can probably get something to work. But then the slop proliferates into yet another domain…

 

[z2amiller]

FWIW I've been using Claude a lot in my building, but as a validator and not a builder.
"I" even built a thing to auto-generate a spice model from my schematics and run simulations.
Building checks to make sure I haven't reversed an op-amp or potentiometer, that I haven't accidentally paralleled
an input trace next to a power trace, etc. It's been useful to ask 'what if' questions about power filtering, etc -
honestly the Anthropic models at least have a ton of electrical engineering context that I don't have.
I'm not totally fooled though, I'm a software engineer by profession and I see the hallucinations
and sloppy work in a domain I _do_ fully understand, so I can only assume that there's a
fairly equal amount of mistakes in a domain that I don't really have the background to challenge.
But still, it's been a very useful tool.

However, even if I could, I wouldn't automate the schema translation and layout.
What's the point of automating your hobby?

 

[ICTRock]

Looks like some pretty big leaps in automated PCB design. Makes me wonder if it will generate a whole new crop of YATS peddlers peddling their pedals, similar to the pandemic boom.

Can AI design circuit boards yet?

A look at what current models can build, where they fail, and how EEBench tests the electronics in simulation.

eebench.org

pair it up with one of those Hakko soldering robots and you've replaced most of the people on this forum in an afternoon.