All ideasMore in Hobbies

The AI debugged a circuit board all day and night with a servo hitting the power switch

A man built a small rig for his single board computer with two microcontrollers, one for the serial terminal and one running a servo taped to power switches so the AI could power cycle the board itself. Left running, the AI spent all day and night working through the board’s network chip quirks until the driver worked.

How it works

  1. He builds a rig with a serial terminal link and a servo that can power cycle the board
  2. The AI runs tests, reads the serial output and resets the board when it hangs
  3. It keeps going all day and night
  4. The network driver ends up working

Why it’s worth knowing

With a servo for a finger, the agent reset the board and debugged it alone through the night until the driver worked.

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

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.