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.

I have both Altium and Kicad experience. Can you explain further how you are setting up the AI to interface with KiCad? Is your AI having keyboard/mouse access or are you doing it only through API? Not familiar with Claude interface.

I have had good success with Claude Code combined with https://github.com/mixelpixx/Konnect. I still need to do routing manually but it is quite useful for reviews of the design and even of the final PCB.

I have it convert Altium files to Kicad and then it uses the Kicad api to control things. If you give it encouragement it should be able to convert back to Altium by parsing the format and building a tool. Supposedly I have this built though I have not validated it. You can also ask it how it would do this and it will have ideas.

I'd like the AI to do the schematic for me, as I always worry I've missed some decoupling capacitor or something. I can do the routing myself (I like routing). It would also be good if the AI could fill in all the LCSC identifiers for assembly. Is that doable nowadays?

Yes! They’re good at reading data sheets and finding things to add, locating LCSC parts, and making sure they’re connected in the schematic. They don’t always make a pretty schematic but they can be convinced to make the look a bit better than their default attempts will produce.

Excellent, thank you! I'm definitely adding an LLM review/assembly step then!

Will it improve already routed board? I have one done ages ago. Works fine, but RAM can only do roughly a half bandwidth because of poorly laid traces. Could I tell AI to reroute them according to best practices?

Ya it can

sweet

> 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.

I can speak from experience here (I’ve been around small-scale electronics design/manufacturing for decades via my father’s business and was hands-on with it on an ag-IoT project for about 10 years).

The limiting factor in electronics/PCB development and manufacturing isn’t engineering expertise (there are plenty of sufficiently competent electronics engineers in the world, especially in Asia), nor parts/materials or assembly costs. It’s the endlessly laborious grunt work of testing a design and making minor improvements until it is finally ready for volume production. That process can easily take a year or two even for a fairly simple design. Even a really skilled/experienced engineer can make a simple mistake in a schematic or PCB layout, which only gets picked up weeks later when prototypes are assembled and tested, or even later when a batch has been made and shipped to customers. So, each design-assemble-test cycle takes weeks/months, and each testing/diagnosing/repairing session takes hours or days. And it mostly has to be undertaken by degree-qualified engineers or experienced technicians.

And that’s mostly before you’ve written all the firmware, which is incredibly laborious in its own right.

The outcome is that only very large companies with big sales volumes can afford to do it (or niche players able to sell at huge margins, most commonly in defense or medical industries).

Outside of those sectors, it’s now just not really viable to be a small-medium business selling moderate volumes of units anymore, the way it was in the 80s-90s. I’ve seen it up close in agricultural IoT. There are no big/dominant players (customer needs are too heterogeneous and distribution is so hard). There are many small vendors, but they find it hard to make products that work well and that customers love, especially at a price point most growers will go for. So, no vendors are big commercial winners and not many customers are very happy - even though there’s a great need for technology in this sector. And it’s really not because the vendors and their engineers are incompetent; it’s just really hard.

With AI to take care of so much of the grunt work involved with circuit/schematic design, PCB layout, pre-manufacturing verification, testing, and firmware dev, it’s realistic to me that you could cut down on R&D costs by 90%, make it much faster to get products onto the market, and make it possible for so many more high-quality niche products to be commercially viable.

I don't understand your argument. PCB design is not that hard you can learn how to do it in a month or so. JLCPCB can print (or even assemble) PCBs for next to nothing. Irrespective of AI it seems easier than ever to produce prototypes right now.

Yes, you can learn PCB design “in a month”, design your board and get a batch of prototypes made up by JLCPCB. All of that takes 2-3 months absolute minimum. Then you have to test the boards. You need a lot of costly equipment and expertise to test the board and fix any problems with it. That can take days to weeks of work. Then ordering your next batch of prototypes carries a 2-4 week turnaround time including shipping. Repeat this for any design error or just any improvement you want to make once you’ve tried working with it for a bit.

Then you have to write the firmware. That’s weeks or months of work. (And much of the embedded firmware code I’ve seen come out of small business engineering departments or consulting shops is terrible, because they don’t have the time/budget or organizational structure that delivers clean, readable, well-structured, well abstracted C code.)

All this is before you get an MVP into the hands of your customers. Then you start getting customer feedback and have to start making more improvements.

“Never been easier” it may well be to get a hobby project prototypes. But for a product with any amount of serious functionality, it’s at least months and likely 1-2 years to get anything into volume production.

But the potential for saving huge amounts of time particularly on design/layout, pre-manufacturing error detection, and production of well-structured and debugged firmware code are huge.

I don’t know why you need to be snarky. I’ve been living this for over a decade with engineers with decades of experience who have done some of the most advanced electronics work imaginable (satellites, military drones).

To test and rework a surface-mount PCB, you may need:

- logic analyzer or oscilloscope;

- microscope;

- high precision soldering equipment/ability;

- solder paste and oven;

- cutting equipment to cut through 4-6 PCB layers and connect tracks with hair-width wire;

- Years/decades of education and experience to understand what to look for and what to do when you find a problem.

It’s a low move to suggest that I would ban you over a substantive disagreement in a discussion. I wouldn’t last a day in this job if I misused power like that.

> If you made the PCB then you should be well placed to fix issues with it. You don't need years of experience , you have the schematic. A microscope (if you need it) is 40 USD. A logic analyser is 10 USD. Solder paste and hot air is only for specific parts and that is 30 usd.

This is obviously at the extreme low end of the amount of experience and cost/quality of equipment you need to do serious work. Decent oscilloscopes or logic analyzers alone are several hundred dollars, and I didn’t even mention a programmer module, which is $500+ for a licensed J-Link. And you need to be a proficient C programmer.

> I am assuming 2 layer - 6 layer PCBs are very specialised (e.g. drones)

I am talking about 4-6 layer multi-MCU boards for reading from multiple different types of environmental sensors, connecting to multiple different network types (Bluetooth, cellular, satellite) and supporting multiple different power options (lithium battery, 12V DC, USB, solar). Painstakingly minimized power consumption, redundant data storage. Analogue front end for impedance readings of legacy soil moisture sensors. It’s a lot to get right together and to all work reliably in outdoor/remote contexts. But plenty of products that could be useful to reasonably large numbers of people (e.g. advanced home automation/robotics) would need to be comparably sophisticated.

Elsewhere in the thread you’ve written:

> PCB design is not that hard. People trying to offload this to AI are also unwilling or unable to put in the work to actually diagnose issues and finish the project.

This is a dismissive value judgement against others whose circumstances you don’t know about. It’s clearly hard, relative to other kinds of technology work (web/desktop software etc), and not worth it if you can’t get to volume production and sales.

So, sure, you can learn simple PCB design and get a simple 2-layer board in your hands in a month. Degree-qualified electronics engineers and companies obviously exist to provide the rest of the capabilities needed to get a serious product built and all the way to market and volume sales.

It’s clearly not always as effortless as you’re making it out to be in order to justify the sneer.

I agree with you, high frequency is a totally different domain. But for the majority of projects, you don't need to buy special equipment. It's very accessible and PCBs are super cheap to print nowadays.

I am definitely bitter (and biased) because I frequent a PCB review subreddit and increasingly people show up with zero knowledge expecting people to review their AI-generated projects for free.

Fair enough, thanks for the reply and for understanding. I can understand that must be frustrating.

I actually think another benefit of AI is that it can make it more realistic for people to self-educate and get further towards getting devices working without needing free help from forums. How they get help when they get stuck, without pestering forums like yours for free help is an interesting challenge.

I still think the biggest upside of AI in electronics is for people who are experienced and competent, being able to get the laborious design/layout work done more quickly, get errors found sooner, get their designs right in fewer iterations, and get feature-rich firmware written and debugged faster. If true, that alone can mean more high quality electronics products hitting the market. That’s the point I was making. Nothing to do with newbies freeloading off experienced engineers on forums.

Thanks for the discussion.

As tomhow points out, you are likely going to need more than just a multimeter. However, the hard part isn't whipping up a board that's 90% of the way there; it's the last 10%. I'm currently on revision ~11 of a hobby project which is far less complex than anything tomhow is talking about (4 layer PCB, 8-bit microcontroller, one analogue sensor circuit). Even the first revision of the board 'worked' for the most part, so I'm clearly not totally incompetent. It's just that the kind of polish that takes you a day or two of iteration if you're designing a web frontend can take months (or years, if you're working in your spare time) when you're constrained by manufacturing lead time and the need to test a physical object. There's a huge gap between "Yay! LED flashes!" and a marketable niche consumer product. Even just successfully putting the bloody thing in a box can require a lot of trial and error.

The firmware is not to be underestimated either. In my case that's about 6000 lines of C. That doesn't sound like much, but writing, testing and updating C code targeting an 8-bit microcontroller is a whole different ball game to writing generic application code. The time investment per line is vastly higher. (In fairness, choosing an EFM8 instead of an 32-bit ARM part was probably a mistake on my part.)

I recently layed out and ordered a single-sided two-layer board with only a minimum config STM32 + crystal, two USB ports with ESD protection, and two LEDs (one is always-on). I went for commodity SMD parts and it still costs 20 USD per unit to produce and ship from China. Even that PCB doesn't work right now.

[Sorry, dear reader. This post turned into a rubber duck session at your expense.]

The main peripheral and reason for the PCB is a USB MIDI device with a bit of custom sysex. Modifying an Adafruit was out of the question; the MIDI peripheral powers itself and the microcontroller/host, and the other USB peripheral. (Basically always, the host shall provide power. This USB connector, however, was designed for a proprietary, discontinued, expensive accessory.) I chose STM32 over 8051 or AVR or RP2040 because it's the cheapest dual-USB chip stocked by LCSC with good vendor tool support. I'm writing my own code because there's no ST middleware for MIDI.

The second LED should blink until both devices are plugged in and then remain steady, on. In testing, the LED visibly changes its timing after the second USB attach but doesn't stay on (rather, it blinks at a shorter and shorter period until simply shutting off, at which point the MIDI communication stops; the timing of the shutoff is not consistent) and the USB input events only register 40% of the time until the MIDI shutdown.

The LED is misconfigured intentionally; it's open drain and GPIO while I try to fix the MIDI nonsense. Later, I'll change it to push-pull on TIM2 to support PWM brightness (e.g. to monitor audio levels when not in text entry mode). Changing GPIO to PWM is its own minor pain because the USER CODE lines in the ST USB code are separate from the USB_Init/USB_RegisterClass/USB_Start sequence, so I have to reinsert my MIDI class every time I change something in CubeMX even if I don't change the USB configuration. (The USER CODE sections persist so that you can change the chip configuration and keep your code.)

Open-drain could explain weird LED behavior but not the communication shutoff. The MCU and LDO don't get noticeably warm, so I doubt it's an overcurrent situation.

I suspect D+/D- could be at the wrong level. As most STM32s, the microcontroller runs at 3.3 rather than 5 volts. (I would've loved an atmega32u4 for its 8-bit simplicity and native 5V operation but then the PCB will be double the cost and size as I'd need a pair of MCUs talking to each other with each one having a single USB port or else an off-chip USB host IC etc.) Sure, I can use a cheap multimeter to test the USB data lines, but this tells me the average level and not if the waveform is being clipped on the positive side (which is usually only a problem under 3 volts). Even if it's an electrical issue, an oscilloscope will reveal the cause but still won't provide a solution. It'll be up to me to cobble together more circuitry.

More probable is at least one code mistake, like a stack overflow or buffer overrun or peripheral misconfiguration/failure. I'm registering any expected USB class on both ports: HID and CDC and MIDI. The whole idea of the board is converting arbitrary USB input (PC keyboard, MIDI controller, joystick, etc.) into specific MIDI messages at standard USB data rates e.g. 12 Mbit/s at both ports with a fairly large buffer. The main MIDI device (supplying the power) will drop the connection after a few seconds of inactivity. I'm using an ST-Link V3 MINIE to step through, which is the cheapest I'd go on a debugger. Luckily I added SWO to my debug port and can still get useful debug info without stopping the processor. I also have to snip the power line of an OTG USB cable if I want the second USB peripheral to be a PC, which is a nifty hack you usually don't learn in the one month PCB design crash course.

I have zero visibility into what the commercial USB MIDI device expects (bus speed, signal characteristics) from the discontinued accessory and only knew its connection handshake from a random, otherwise-inactive Github user's single commit.

In any case, the USB algorithms I wrote work when the host is a PC and the code is ported to Python.

I could reroute pins to ADC and roll my own built-in oscilloscope (it's QFP and not BGA chosen specifically that I can solder in a hotfix, because I've done board design before and know it NEVER, EVER, NOT ONCE EVER goes right on the first attempt) but I'd rather spend time with my kids than a choose-your-own-adventure debug hackathon in my disorganized home office, although I did fall into the IDE trap. Every few years, IDEs and toolchains and build systems change, and this project was no different. Rather than STM32CubeIDE, I took a few hours to teach myself to use the STM32Cube Core and marus25 Cortex-Debug extensions in VS Code, as that seems to be the current trend at ST, and I do favor a vendor-agnostic, Eclipse-free workflow.

If this were my first project and I had to buy all of the tools for debugging, it would probably cost 200 euros or more even if I only buy cheap knockoffs. The other commenter suggesting a $10 logic analyzer?? I mean... I do own one of those, but it's barely tee-ball compared to the major leagues of Lauterbach or Rohde & Schwarz or even Saleae.

In any case, I fear I'll need a new revision with its two-week turnaround or at least a manual rewire of this design. It's frustrating... such a simple design, and I've already sunk over 100 euros and at least 10 hours into it and have a bug with odd symptoms. And, as a PCB design tradition, I'll be humbled and humiliated when I discover it's something like a missing switch case or a wrong clock setting or otherwise relatively basic mistake.

I'm not the first to state: There's a reason it's not called easyware.

Allow me to extend my sincere sympathies.

PCB debugging is honestly one of the most intense experiences I've had in my life (and I don't even have a boss looking over my shoulder). It requires intense physical and mental concentration. You're dealing with a hypothesis space that includes both software and hardware faults, and you're also having to make delicate manipulations of a physical object.

At the robotics lab I work with it’s not uncommon for a piece of electronics to require a multi thousand dollar voltmeter, because they need to measure precisely extremely small voltages. We have a bunch of these in our lab for example: https://www.tek.com/en/products/keithley/digital-multimeter/...

Your series of comments in this thread frankly demonstrate a lack of understanding of what electrical engineering is. Yes if you want to make glowing LEDs then a multimeter and other cheap equipment are all you need, and you might be able to learn that in a month. But electrical engineering is so much deeper than that. Trouble comes when you have things like high power circuits right next to sensitive high speed signals. Eg a compact drone motherboard could be driving potentially hundreds of watts of switching currents right next to high speed camera sensor data streams.

There’s countless examples of what can make electrical engineering hard. If you don’t understand, don’t argue with people online - listen to people with experience and seek to understand why without challenging what surprises you. It’s all very interesting if you want to learn it.

Unfortunately, my experience has been that it's the endless cycling with customer requirements that takes all the time.

The hardware is generally manageable quickly for me. Even th firmware isn't terrible.

And then you deploy it.

And the customer realizes it needs to do Q and that they asked it to do X and it doesn't need to do that and we need to take another $0.50 out of the BOM and ...

And then 4 years pass and you still don't have any real revenue.

There is a reason why so many places demand NRE of $1 million minimum and THEN they'll talk about designing your project.

The big gap isn't scaling. It's the scaling PATH. You need to have a viable and profitable path all along AS you scale from tens to thousands to millions. And those projects are VERY rare.

See: BeatBuddy for interesting post mortem and note that AI wouldn't really have helped them much at all.

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?

The verification problem for hardware is a couple of orders of magnitude harder than it is for software because there often (usually) is no 'right' solution. There is a balance of tradeoffs governed by several information sources including standards, company policies, design trade offs and engineer preferences. Software style 'Lint checks' will exist for basic things like functional correctness - e.g. verifying net connectivity. But many verifications for things like EMC, EMI, SI, PI and thermal require engineering judgement to balance tradeoffs.

We're building a verification loop for hardware at Engentica, with a focus initially on EMC/EMI, and I do think the problem is solvable. But it requires a harness with lots of built in solvers for the hardware vertical, and I don't think it's something that LLMs will crack on their own.

As engineers adopt AI to help build circuits more and more, I think hybrid AI/deterministic verification will only get more important.

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.

Ya that makes sense. I will say tho that for things like mechanical CAD, text is extremely limiting. But yeah the learning curve is real and you can’t learn it all. I’ve started trying a bit of LLM assisted mechanical design, but I am basically too skilled there to accept what it is doing. I want to keep trying tho, I like learning how these things can work.

And yeah I always imagined hiring a PCB designer to help but it always seemed like a lot. To have a reliable tool I can use any time I want is wonderful.

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?

Yes I think generative board design will become better packaged, trained, and validated, and that it will be common place for electrical engineers to rely more on these tools. Major vendors like Altium will add tools like this and their use will become commonplace in industry. For hobbyists, you will be able to specify a board design in natural language and have it completed with unprecedented ease. I’m excited to help my raver friends make wearable glowie things.

I find it hard to predict what technology will be like in four years, but the next major leap for these tools will be higher level system specification and integrated design. What you want is not a circuit board what you want is a product. The tools will bring multiple functions together and fully integrated iterative design will accelerate development.

Despite the many problems with the AI roll out I am fundamentally excited for tools which can accelerate our engineering development. We will build things much faster in 4 years than today. One year of progress will in some instances take one week.

I am particularly interested in how this might begin to accelerate change in heavy industry. With hope it will help us build fusion power reactors and high speed electric trains.

I hope we find the courage to support every person who for one reason or another does not ride this wave. We will have so much more to share, or to hoard.

This is a big leap. So far LLMs are really good at turning training data into accurate results. The more data, the better. LLMs are very, very bad at making intuitive leaps based on the 'shape' of sparse data- a technique that is, to be fair, pretty rare in humans as well, but essential to progress. Maybe they can make up for it with brute force and the precision and breadth of knowledge that only an LLM can have, we'll see.

I don't think we've nailed the architecture that will allow things like generalized self directed training, yet, which is what would be needed for something like 'make fusion better'

Are you sure about that?

They seem to be able to make intuitive leaps pretty well. They need to make the same leaps over and over, though, because they lack online learning, so the discoveries only persist after the next training cycle. Context only goes so far.

We're pouring billions into solving that, though, so I would be surprised if we don't get there soon.

I've been playing in this space as a hobby for a while. I agree the current round of startups are dead ends but I doubt LLMs will be good enough without drastically different tooling than today (ECAD and ATE). I've been playing around on a DSL for schematic capture alongside the design contract and it works for most subcircuits quite naturally. From that you can deterministically create a set of simulations and hardware tests to validate everything.

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?

In this case it’s not AI that helps its full service board fab and assembly shops like JLCPCB. It’s so cheap to order fully assembled boards there I don’t bother assembling mine at home anymore. Bonus is you don’t need to mess with tiny components. You can put a 1x1mm 4 pin BGA on there and they will happily solder it for you.

Ahem. For you or for the AI?

Yes.

I guess I walked right into that one.

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.