Cool demo, but letting an AI Agent drive a physical probe may have problems. AI is probabilistic, but hardware is precise. If the model miscalculates a pin's position by even 0.1mm, the probe may crush the board. I am curious how the author actually bridges the gap between the Agent’s 'guess' and the sub-millimeter precision needed to avoid damaging hardware?
Guy builds AI driven hardware hacker arm from duct tape, old cam and CNC machine
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Re: Guy builds AI driven hardware hacker arm from duct tape, old cam and CNC machine
#22Cool demo, but letting an AI Agent drive a physical probe may have problems. AI is probabilistic, but hardware is precise. If the model miscalculates a pin's position by even 0.1mm, the probe may crush the board. I am curious how the author actually bridges the gap between the Agent’s 'guess' and the sub-millimeter precision needed to avoid damaging hardware?
I think this is roughly solved. Tell the agent to do all of its calculations in python.
Re: Guy builds AI driven hardware hacker arm from duct tape, old cam and CNC machine
#23Interesting. Not clear what it really does. The hardware is an oscilloscope probe on a 3-axis CNC mechanism. That's called a "flying probe", and you can buy one.[1] Fine. But what does the AI do? It "ingests the project", but what does that mean? Finding all the pins? That's a start. Using a SPICE model to figure out what should be on each pin, and checking? Now that would be impressive. Probably something in between…
feels like the author is hallucinating an instant solution to a problem with scope size of "research team and five years" class
Re: Guy builds AI driven hardware hacker arm from duct tape, old cam and CNC machine
#24Guy builds car from stick of gum, paperclip, and an old vehicle
Re: Guy builds AI driven hardware hacker arm from duct tape, old cam and CNC machine
#25Would be cool if you could use this (with 2 probes) to build a wiring net for reverse engineering.
Re: Guy builds AI driven hardware hacker arm from duct tape, old cam and CNC machine
#26It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting this to be real more than I do, but this is nowhere close to being ready to do actual work. Photographing real PCBs is hard, there is no fiducial maths, no actual probing is being done. It's just photos of a photo being piped into an agent. If it actually did what it claims, no reasonable person would exclude it from the demo video. https://gainsec.com/2026/04/16/autoprober/
Could an agent no develop a bespoke correction algorithm for the photos of the photo?
Why feed it photos of a photo when you could just feed it the photo that was printed out?
Re: Guy builds AI driven hardware hacker arm from duct tape, old cam and CNC machine
#27Interesting. Not clear what it really does. The hardware is an oscilloscope probe on a 3-axis CNC mechanism. That's called a "flying probe", and you can buy one.[1] Fine. But what does the AI do? It "ingests the project", but what does that mean? Finding all the pins? That's a start. Using a SPICE model to figure out what should be on each pin, and checking? Now that would be impressive. Probably something in between…
I believe the standard production check is more like you check continuity between known nets, given that you're the manufacturer, you already know where they are exposed, and therefore you can perform those checks before adding any components. Post component checks are a lot more complicated because active components and passive components will modify the visible voltages and characteristics, often to the point where you won't have the same degree of physical insight.
I would assume once machines are set up that this is only really done if you're not confident of your manufacturing line for some reason (eg. maintenance, reconfiguration) or you are pushing limits somewhere, for example, particularly small vias or traces very close to the edge of the board.
To make this useful, you would want two flying probes because otherwise it's not going to be telling you much you don't already know.
Re: Guy builds AI driven hardware hacker arm from duct tape, old cam and CNC machine
#28Interesting. Not clear what it really does. The hardware is an oscilloscope probe on a 3-axis CNC mechanism. That's called a "flying probe", and you can buy one.[1] Fine. But what does the AI do? It "ingests the project", but what does that mean? Finding all the pins? That's a start. Using a SPICE model to figure out what should be on each pin, and checking? Now that would be impressive. Probably something in between…
I think the novel idea here is you jam some hardware together (whatever you like) that can do "physical real world" things with a well understood interface and then spin up Claude with access to it. The way I'm thinking about it is, it's a _workflow_ innovation? So you ask for data sheets for all the visible chips and get PDFs in an output directory with minimal user interaction except to flip the board, ask for a ba…
It's lower level than that. "It will probe the approved targets and report back." It has enough smarts to find the pins, and maybe it can read the text labels on some ICs, but that's about it. That eliminates much drudgery, though. And probably the job of some tech who did that by hand.
Re: Guy builds AI driven hardware hacker arm from duct tape, old cam and CNC machine
#29Interesting. Not clear what it really does. The hardware is an oscilloscope probe on a 3-axis CNC mechanism. That's called a "flying probe", and you can buy one.[1] Fine. But what does the AI do? It "ingests the project", but what does that mean? Finding all the pins? That's a start. Using a SPICE model to figure out what should be on each pin, and checking? Now that would be impressive. Probably something in between…
I believe the standard production check is more like you check continuity between known nets, given that you're the manufacturer, you already know where they are exposed, and therefore you can perform those checks before adding any components. Post component checks are a lot more complicated because active components and passive components will modify the visible voltages and characteristics, often to the point where…
That's a blank board test. This is straightforward given the netlist and Gerber files.[1] It's just a continuity check between known points. Does not require AI.
[1] https://bayareacircuits.com/bare-printed-circuit-board-elect...
Re: Guy builds AI driven hardware hacker arm from duct tape, old cam and CNC machine
#30I watched the linked in video:
https://videos.files.wordpress.com/gD3kAWlO/autoprober-demo....
But I am not sure what do I see there? Is that some 3D printing?