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Show HN: Copperhead – Cursor for circuit boards

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31–40 of 120 posts

Re: Show HN: Copperhead – Cursor for circuit boards

#31

The space is definitely heating up. Flux.ai being the incumbent Silixon based out of the UK have been showing demos Quilter and DeepPCB for layout The recent OpenAI demo... I went the other way and pre-designed sub circuits with a set of rules that allows simple merge assembly, unfortunately I didn't have the time or budget to continue with it, but I took the constrained approach as with hardware, things can't be 99%…

> The one thing I will say, is that my experience of hardware engineers is very gatekeepy.

Stay away from Reddit and forums if you want to see where the open minded people are looking. There are a lot of communities where EEs are experimenting with newer technologies and sharing their results, with realistic appraisals of what can be done.

You also need to understand the history of autorouting technology for PCBs. Autorouters with auto layout have been around in many forms for years. Their output never compares to a skilled EE doing it manually. The gap between autorouter output and skilled operator output is even bigger than the gap between a good developer and average AI codegen slop.

I’m interested in this space, but even the Fable/Astra or dedicated tools like Quilter, Flux, and others have a very, very long way to go for boards more complex than simple hobby boards.

I do think this is going to be good for hobby people doing simple PCBs though

Re: Show HN: Copperhead – Cursor for circuit boards

#32

The space is definitely heating up. Flux.ai being the incumbent Silixon based out of the UK have been showing demos Quilter and DeepPCB for layout The recent OpenAI demo... I went the other way and pre-designed sub circuits with a set of rules that allows simple merge assembly, unfortunately I didn't have the time or budget to continue with it, but I took the constrained approach as with hardware, things can't be 99%…

> The one thing I will say, is that my experience of hardware engineers is very gatekeepy. Stay away from Reddit and forums if you want to see where the open minded people are looking. There are a lot of communities where EEs are experimenting with newer technologies and sharing their results, with realistic appraisals of what can be done. You also need to understand the history of autorouting technology for PCBs. Au…

NP-hard problems are still NP-hard even with magical LLM pixie sprinkles. =3

Re: Show HN: Copperhead – Cursor for circuit boards

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The one thing I will say, is that my experience of hardware engineers is very gatekeepy. Stay away from Reddit and forums if you want to see where the open minded people are looking. There are a lot of communities where EEs are experimenting with newer technologies and sharing their results, with realistic appraisals of what can be done. You also need to understand the history of autorouting technology for PCBs. Au…

NP-hard problems are still NP-hard even with magical LLM pixie sprinkles. =3

They're also NP-hard for the humans doing the majority of the work currently, meaning that good enough heuristics dominate as it is.

Re: Show HN: Copperhead – Cursor for circuit boards

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NP-hard problems are still NP-hard even with magical LLM pixie sprinkles. =3

They're also NP-hard for the humans doing the majority of the work currently, meaning that good enough heuristics dominate as it is.

Every trace on a PCB is a traveling salesman problem with ballooning complexity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem

While physics informed models do exist, they are still going to burn a lot of compute to generate failure modes people didn't know were possible. =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ

Re: Show HN: Copperhead – Cursor for circuit boards

#40
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use a jigsaw to cut wood. It works pretty good. What’s the point of a table saw?

You joke but my coping saw cuts wood much faster than any of my normal saws. I don't know a lot about saws, I presume it's the type of blade on it. And I do indeed have three saws, which is a lot for someone who doesn't know much about saws. One that says it's good for cutting metal, one for wood and one for tight corners in wood (a coping saw).

wait are you the mitxela from youtube fluid simulation pendant video
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