All ideasMore in Hobbies
Hobbies

An AI designed his circuit board on its own and the board worked first try

A maker had an LLM design a circuit board by running KiCad headlessly from a terminal, checking the design in a loop until it passed every rule check. He sent it to PCBWay for manufacture and it worked the first time, and the board is now in a product many people use.

How it works

  1. The LLM runs KiCad headlessly from a terminal with some Python
  2. It checks the design against the rule checker in a loop and fixes what fails
  3. He sends the files to PCBWay
  4. The made board works the first time and goes into a product people use

Why it’s worth knowing

A board designed by an agent alone in a terminal passed its checks and worked the moment it came back from the factory.

Where it’s from

Summarized from a public post on news.ycombinator.com. See the original ↗

Upgraded prompt

A ready-to-use prompt for this idea, built from research on what makes AI agents do the job right: who the AI should be, the exact steps, and a check to make sure it was done the way you wanted.

1Who the AI should be
2The prompt, with the steps
3The check when it’s done
Upgraded prompts are coming soon.

Try next

HobbiesSpark Learned a Writer's Voice From Sent Emails and Saved It as a Reusable SkillHobbiesI cut my bots' wakeups from about 300 a week to about 140HobbiesFill and submit UK master’s applications from one master fileHobbiesThe AI built its own mail app in 23 minutes

Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.