Ah, the elusive light emitting inductor
"Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"
41–50 of 106 posts
Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Feel free to star/watch the repo for the project at: https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph I may be able to set up an RSS feed for the blog if that interests you? edit: https://phaestus.app/feed.xml There's a limited sign up currently on the site, which currently goes to an approval page. I don't think I'm quite ready for it to be fully open yet, as i'm paying all the inference, but I should be starting to populate th…
RSS feed would be helpful.
Done, https://phaestus.app/feed.xml. If there's any issues i'd appreciate the feedback, I haven't used an RSS feed in a while!
Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"
#43Why, yes I am. I know Ben is having some fun, perhaps making a valid point, with the burning component on the breadboard. I think it does underscore a difference between software vibing and hardware vibing—crash vs. fire. But in fact vibe-breadboarding has drawn me deeper into the electronics hobby. I have learned more about op-amps and analog computing in the past two months in large part thanks to Gemini and ChatGP…
Both Gemini and ChatGPT have a pretty comically wrong knowledge of op-amps. They usually recommend outdated chips and are confused about circuit topologies. I was looking at this last week and it hasn't changed. I asked them to suggest and evaluate microphone circuits and they were just bad. I would really, really recommend reading some human-written text if you're learning about that. I can't think of any reason why…
Thanks, I have read a lot of human-written text (and actual books from the day) in addition to the LLM feedback. Again though, had I ignored LLMs altogether I would have barely progressed in the past two months. I think. They seem to act as an "idea board" of sorts—sends me out then looking for others to validate (or not) what they're spouting.
"Schottky diodes to protect op-amp inputs…" Not op-amp inputs, ADC inputs (which may well come from an op-amp output though—I am playing with analog computing after all).
Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a way to stay up to date with what you are doing? It very much aligns with how I've approached hardware since I was 15 and had a massive stack of functional blocks of electronics circuitry that I would combine in all kinds of ways. I've lost the 3x5's, but I still work that way, build a simple block, test it, build another block, test that, hook the one to the other etc.
Feel free to star/watch the repo for the project at: https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph I may be able to set up an RSS feed for the blog if that interests you? edit: https://phaestus.app/feed.xml There's a limited sign up currently on the site, which currently goes to an approval page. I don't think I'm quite ready for it to be fully open yet, as i'm paying all the inference, but I should be starting to populate th…
NP, I don't do GitHub (because MS), but I'll bookmark your pages and check back periodically. Please do post to HN whenever you reach an interesting milestone and feel free to reach out.
Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"
#45Why, yes I am. I know Ben is having some fun, perhaps making a valid point, with the burning component on the breadboard. I think it does underscore a difference between software vibing and hardware vibing—crash vs. fire. But in fact vibe-breadboarding has drawn me deeper into the electronics hobby. I have learned more about op-amps and analog computing in the past two months in large part thanks to Gemini and ChatGP…
Just this morning I was vibing with Gemini to make a battery-powered stove monitor to sell that I might call "Yes I turned off the stupid stove" :-) Gemini was suggesting the circuit design and of course I'd do the final work myself, but I find vibe-circuit-building to be quite valuable.
Easiest way to get this foolproof would be to put an induction loop around the power cable and use the reading from that as a proxy for on/off state.
It would catch any case where the stove is drawing power, irrespective of possible failure modes of the stove itself.
Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"
#46Why, yes I am. I know Ben is having some fun, perhaps making a valid point, with the burning component on the breadboard. I think it does underscore a difference between software vibing and hardware vibing—crash vs. fire. But in fact vibe-breadboarding has drawn me deeper into the electronics hobby. I have learned more about op-amps and analog computing in the past two months in large part thanks to Gemini and ChatGP…
> I have found better ADC chips than the ones that come pre-soldered on most EDP32 dev boards (and have breadboarded them up with success). Depending on your setup: beware of your ground and realize that breadboards are an extremely bad fit for this sort of application. It's hard enough to get maximum performance out of a good DAC on a custom designed PCB, on a breadboard it can be a nightmare.
The breadboard has validated the communication between the ESP32 and ADC chip (over I2C).
It's enough that I've now moved to KiCad layout and will wait for the boards to come back to see if the actual ADC data I am getting is more or less linear, noiseless…
Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"
#47Been working on this exact problem for a while now. The core issue isn't that LLMs are bad at circuits, it's that we're asking them to do novel design when they should be doing selection and integration. My project ( https://phaestus.app/blog ) takes a different approach: pre-validated circuit blocks on a fixed 12.7mm grid with standardized bus structures. The LLM picks which blocks you need and where they go, but th…
> The core issue isn't that LLMs are bad at circuits, it's that we're asking them to do novel design when they should be doing selection and integration. I don't want to detract from what you're building, but I'm puzzled by this sentence. It very much sounds like the problem is that they're bad at circuits and that you're working around this problem by making them choose from a catalog. Try that for code. "The proble…
Are there examples of LLMs generating novel code? If so, who is it novel to?
Not trying to be a smart ass here, I’ve been keeping an eye out for years.
Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"
#48Why, yes I am. I know Ben is having some fun, perhaps making a valid point, with the burning component on the breadboard. I think it does underscore a difference between software vibing and hardware vibing—crash vs. fire. But in fact vibe-breadboarding has drawn me deeper into the electronics hobby. I have learned more about op-amps and analog computing in the past two months in large part thanks to Gemini and ChatGP…
> vibe-breadboarding has drawn me deeper into the electronics hobby.
Exactly. I'm a life-long software guy, but I've dabbled in electronics at various times. But typically I'd hit walls that I just didn't know how to get past, and it wasn't easy to find solutions. If I'd had an LLM to help, I'm pretty sure I'd have become much more deeply involved in electronics.
Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"
#49Not LLM, just good old Monte Carlo. I made pedalgen [1] some time ago, it generate random guitar pedals, check the Results section.
Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The core issue isn't that LLMs are bad at circuits, it's that we're asking them to do novel design when they should be doing selection and integration. I don't want to detract from what you're building, but I'm puzzled by this sentence. It very much sounds like the problem is that they're bad at circuits and that you're working around this problem by making them choose from a catalog. Try that for code. "The proble…
Are there examples of LLMs generating novel code? If so, who is it novel to? Not trying to be a smart ass here, I’ve been keeping an eye out for years.
Are most circuits novel? I'd assume that there is enough out there to fit 80% of PCB design needs and sure it can still be bad at the remaining 20%.