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Show HN: AI CAD Harness

fusion.adam.new

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Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#41

Post by contingencies »

donatj wrote: post #36

My friend is an electrical engineer. He designs circuit boards for a living. We were having dinner the other night, and when the topic of AI came up he told me rather confidently that he didn't think AI was coming for his job anytime soon. I kind of cautiously disagreed. He told me that the applications he used had no tooling for AI. I basically said "give it six months". I think in my googling now, it's already here…

People are trying, but it's not here because it's a multi-dimensional problem space where there are local optimums but often no perfect solution and 'good enough' might only be judged through practical testing, integration, or supply chain realities which are at best predictable and often emergent. You can't always foresee why a design will fail until it's 80% done and then you have to go back 20% to solve it another way. This is particularly the case with power, interface, budget, thermal, EMI, radio, optical, spatial, supply chain, firmware, HR, regulatory, deployed unit, or assembly process constrained designs. Turns out that's most non-trivial designs.

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#42

Post by jrflo »

fillskills wrote: post #23
jrflo wrote: post #20

As someone with a background in mechanical engineering, I'd love to be able to automate CAD design as it's quite tedious and only fun like 5% of the time, but I've tried these tools and I really don't think text-to-CAD is the right approach. It usually takes longer for me to come up with an accurate written prompt to fully dimension what I need than to just grab my space mouse and do it.

Could be camera and canvas to CAD - be more apt for your use case? Something akin to minority report + AI? Asking seriously. Context: Have some overlapping interest in the space because I am prototyping a camera based edge device that allows for AR/AI interactions.

The problem is more so that I think I'd need a brain-machine interface to get what I want. If I'm brainstorming a way to solve a problem mechanically, some if it is drawing but honestly a lot of it is just imagining it in my head. From there I go straight from imagination or sketches to CAD, which is why text-to-CAD or drawing-to-CAD generally doesn't work, the act of making the CAD file is how you learn and figure out how to solve the problem better once you see it all in 3D space

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#43

Post by konschubert »

zachdive wrote: post #25
konschubert wrote: post #21

Is the internal data model of fusion structured enough to be understood with a text-based LLM? Or do you need to basically screenshot the render to understand what is happening? Would a more CAD-as-code based approach to CAD design be more suitable? Just like, LLMs have an easier time to build a presentation with latex than with powerpoint...

We are using a CAD as code approach! Like I said in the post we heavily leverage FeatureScript to drive Onshape and Python to drive Fusion

Okay, I will read it and then probably need to google most of these :D

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#44

Post by ua709 »

SauntSolaire wrote: post #40
donatj wrote: post #36

My friend is an electrical engineer. He designs circuit boards for a living. We were having dinner the other night, and when the topic of AI came up he told me rather confidently that he didn't think AI was coming for his job anytime soon. I kind of cautiously disagreed. He told me that the applications he used had no tooling for AI. I basically said "give it six months". I think in my googling now, it's already here…

I largely agree with your friend. There's a big difference between it being possible, and it being adopted. A startup could come out with cutting edge AI integrated eCAD tools tomorrow, and ten years from now Apple will still be using Cadence to design the iPhone. Basically, unless the legacy eCAD companies decide to add it themselves, there's too much pain involved in switching tools — and even with that caveat, Cad…

I second the friend's opinion.

A lot of the people who post online have no experience with the paid PCB tools and those tools already have quite a lot of automation, and the automation interfaces work between different CAD & EDA vendors. Shared, hierarchical, and repurposed schematics are also totally a thing.

I spend almost no time on boiler plate stuff. And with good constraints, which require serious thought and understanding, tons of routing & checks can be automated too. Right now.

So, IMHO, there is not a lot of fat in the process for AI to automate away without a lot more EE and physics models, and the ability to interpret multiple specs, built in. And the current AI tools are very far from that.

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#45

Post by lucasgerads »

donatj wrote: post #36

My friend is an electrical engineer. He designs circuit boards for a living. We were having dinner the other night, and when the topic of AI came up he told me rather confidently that he didn't think AI was coming for his job anytime soon. I kind of cautiously disagreed. He told me that the applications he used had no tooling for AI. I basically said "give it six months". I think in my googling now, it's already here…

I had some success with using Claude in conjunction with my oscilloscope and spice simulations. I think it is an under explored space so far.

In case you are interested: https://lucasgerads.com/blog/lecroy-mcp-spice-demo/

I will post more updates soon.

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#46

Post by zachdive »

fillskills wrote: post #23
jrflo wrote: post #20

As someone with a background in mechanical engineering, I'd love to be able to automate CAD design as it's quite tedious and only fun like 5% of the time, but I've tried these tools and I really don't think text-to-CAD is the right approach. It usually takes longer for me to come up with an accurate written prompt to fully dimension what I need than to just grab my space mouse and do it.

Could be camera and canvas to CAD - be more apt for your use case? Something akin to minority report + AI? Asking seriously. Context: Have some overlapping interest in the space because I am prototyping a camera based edge device that allows for AR/AI interactions.

We have a little experimental tldraw style canvas integrated in the extension we've been playing with!

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#47

Post by zachdive »

konschubert wrote: post #43
zachdive wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are using a CAD as code approach! Like I said in the post we heavily leverage FeatureScript to drive Onshape and Python to drive Fusion

Okay, I will read it and then probably need to google most of these :D

https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2050264512230719980?s=20

Here you can see how code drives the modeling

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#49

Post by zachdive »

jrflo wrote: post #20

As someone with a background in mechanical engineering, I'd love to be able to automate CAD design as it's quite tedious and only fun like 5% of the time, but I've tried these tools and I really don't think text-to-CAD is the right approach. It usually takes longer for me to come up with an accurate written prompt to fully dimension what I need than to just grab my space mouse and do it.

Completely agree and we're exploring a number of modalities. You can actually select edges, faces and specific features to give that context to the model.

It is quite impressive putting in a raw prompt and watching the model just one-shot it though: https://x.com/adamdotnew/status/2050264512230719980?s=20

Re: Show HN: AI CAD Harness

#50

Post by andyfilms1 »

GorbachevyChase wrote: post #31
jrflo wrote: post #20

As someone with a background in mechanical engineering, I'd love to be able to automate CAD design as it's quite tedious and only fun like 5% of the time, but I've tried these tools and I really don't think text-to-CAD is the right approach. It usually takes longer for me to come up with an accurate written prompt to fully dimension what I need than to just grab my space mouse and do it.

Worc.dev might be for you. I might call it Jupyter for engineers. Founder is a Mechanical I seem to see one or two of these CAD projects a week. It’s cool, but the real value is design automation specific to my problem domain. Modeling isn’t usually that hard if you’re comfortable with the software. It would probably take as long to just think about what you need. I find more difficulty in maintaining coherence in co…

Oh man, a non-web version of this would be an insta-buy from me
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