Earlier quoted context omitted.
Freerouting used to be more closely integrated with KiCAD. So what did this project use?
Hand routing.
That's not vibing.
Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
31–40 of 72 posts
Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#32The blog post isn’t clear: Did the LLM actually do the routing? The only screenshot showing connected traces comes after the author says they added ground fills and “tidied up the layout” It’s amazing that this worked at all, but to be clear this layout is actually very bad. Just look at that minimum width trace used to carry power across the entire board and into the ESP32. Using min width traces and wrapping them a…
I could be wrong, but that looks like autoroute to me just based on the aesthetics of it, autoroute has a bit of a "smell" that you can recognize if you pay attention. For example see the via and traces to the left of SW2. No human I know, even a total noob designing their first ever PCB, would do that. Also, it certainly wasn't the LLM; atopile doesn't allow you to specify routing as far as I'm aware, their docs see…
Few other thoughts:
- impressive that this worked so well with LLM-generated atopile, given that atopile is about a year old!
- the hardest part of a PCB is still the routing and nonstandard parts of the design; what this did is basically "find a reference design, pick components that match the reference design, and put them on the correct nets" which is the easiest part of the process for people designing PCBs today
- much like with code, 99% of PCBs designed are fairly basic boards implementing the reference design with some small tweaks, and then there is a tiny amount of envelope-pushing designs/crazy complex stuff. Obviously you can't design some fancy PCB with complex RF with this, but give it some time and I'd bet you can probably make a lot of the basic stuff...
Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#33Amazing. Inspires to try out Claude Code + skidl [1] to build a custom circuit for fun. [1] https://github.com/devbisme/skidl
Tried out claude code with atopile this week, and it's absolutely crazy.
atopile has mcp support and claude loves using it.
The MCP gives access to the atopile design library and compiler amonst other things.
Disclaimer: co-author of atopile here
Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#34This is a really poor experiment and conclusions do not mean much for teo reasons: 1- This PCB is extremely simple. Anyone can design this in no time. 2- This type of automation is as old as EDA tools (which means electronic design automation). Auto floorplanning and routing isn't new in the industry. Yet, LLMs do not perform well in this field. The successful implementations are using custom algorithms + RL. The bar to claim "design via LLMs" is very very high.
Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#35Don't you need a bypass cap on AMS1117 LDO output for stability? Reference design uses two caps each on input and output..
The LLM generated four caps on the LDO output. They're all placed next to each other and away from the LDO, but that seems to have been a human choice. So I can't fault the LLM there.
That said, the AMS1117 datasheet shows a tantalum cap on the output. This is presumably because the non-negligible ESR helps stabilize the regulator, though they don't say that explicitly. The LM1117 datasheet explains this better, stating that "the ESR of the output capacitor should range between 0.3 Ω to 22 Ω". (These are very similar parts, just from different manufacturers.)
The ceramic caps chosen here are probably below that, so perhaps it would ring even with correct layout. The prompt guided towards that bad choice when it said all caps should be 0603, since almost all 0603 capacitors are ceramic. The LLM was free to choose a regulator optimized for use with ceramic output caps, but it probably chose the xx1117 because it's so common.
Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#36Shouldnt this new labeled as a "Show HN"?
Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#37Co-author of atopile here – super excited to see this on HN!
Coincidentally, we just built an MCP server for atopile, and Claude seems to love it. It makes a big difference in usability, and also exposes our re-usable design library[0].
A bit about atopile[1]: Our core idea is to capture design intent in a knowledge graph with constraints and high-level modeling of components and interfaces. This lets us do much more than just AI integrations: we’ve built an in-house constraint solver that can automatically pick passives (resistors, capacitors, etc) based on the values you've constrained in your design.
Currently, atopile directly generates KiCAD PCB files, so you can finish the layout (mainly the connections between reusable layout blocks). We're also generating artifacts like I2C bus trees and 3D models, with power trees and schematic generation on the roadmap.
Happy to answer questions or go into technical details!
Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#38I would be happy if an AI could read the datasheet, produce footprints and schematic symbols, and perhaps 3d models. And present the component characteristics in a unified way.
I mean, some people are claiming that LLMs can do scientific research, so the above isn't too much to ask.
Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#39The blog post isn’t clear: Did the LLM actually do the routing? The only screenshot showing connected traces comes after the author says they added ground fills and “tidied up the layout” It’s amazing that this worked at all, but to be clear this layout is actually very bad. Just look at that minimum width trace used to carry power across the entire board and into the ESP32. Using min width traces and wrapping them a…
> It’s amazing that this worked at all, but to be clear this layout is actually very bad. Just look at that minimum width trace used to carry power across the entire board and into the ESP32. Using min width traces and wrapping them and min clearance to components is a classic mistake of people (or LLMs?) that have zero understanding of PCB layout techniques beyond “draw lines until everything is connected” Is it rea…
No, but at that point, why even leverage a stochastic text generator? Placing hard constraints on a generative algorithm is just regular programming with more steps and greater instability.
Edit: Also, one could just look to the world of decision tree and route-finding algorithms that could probably do this task better than a language model.
Re: Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good
#40> Initially, everything looked great. The build succeeded, all components were found and added. But when I opened KiCad… nothing was wired up.
Maybe this is pedantic, but I thought that the core point of "Vibe Coding" is that you do not look at the code. You "give in to the 'vibes'".
I don't know how to translate it into a physical hardware product exactly, but I think it would be manufacturing it without looking at it, plugging it in for your use-case and seeing if it works, then going back to the model, saying it didn't work, rinse, repeat.