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Comment by turkeygizzard | Hacker News Reader

I was going to say, AI has really enabled my hardware projects recently. I've found incorrect output is less common with the newest models - and they're capable of drawing decent diagrams too which can really help me sanity check some of their ideas. I've also had some success with asking it to cite sources where possible, so I get lots of useful links into robotics forums like chief delphi and similar which also help sure up the math

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I have serious beef with ChatGPT's text-based circuit schematic drawing abilities. Even though the model itself appears to be fully coherent about the big and little picture aspects of whatever's "on bench" I have wasted too much time trying to parse its attempts to draw circuits. I consider them actively harmful in their current form. I quietly hope that one of the LLMs will start actually generating netcode that can be pasted into KiCAD, or even rendering circuit snippets inside of the chat stream properly.

I've seen KiCAD running in the browser, so it's not like this isn't completely doable. It's just a question of resource allocation.

Without any deep knowledge, I was able to build at least a working board with a mcp server [1]. It’s always about the interface. I had to solder a few parts. Yes there where a lot of vias placed. Nice grid but it worked.

[1] https://github.com/mixelpixx/KiCAD-MCP-Server

Thanks for reminding me that that exists! I'll have to give it a try, as it seems to have matured significantly since I last checked.

That said, outside of casual experimentation, I have almost zero need for an LLM to lay out my circuits for me. It's not just that I do have the deep knowledge, but there's so much more to board layout than routing. What parts I've worked with, what I have in inventory and on my PnP.

I also just really love laying out boards, and I'm in no hurry to give that up.

That said, I've found ChatGPT to be extraordinarily useful for part comparisons, getting second opinions on approaches, figuring out resistor divider values, troubleshooting drivers, and so much more it's difficult to enumerate.

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