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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?
Interesting. 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…
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?
I think this is roughly solved. Tell the agent to do all of its calculations in python.
Any combination of such gives you positions of everything within micrometers.
This is not a new problem. Testing of PCBs has been solved a billion times over and the world has had bed of nails tester and flying probe testers for 4 decades old.
We have a 8 finger flying probe machine at our facility that literally all we do is load the board in, load in the design data. It identifies points of interests, learns the fiducials and we let it do a characterization run. We then have engineering review of the resulting data and just let it fly afterwards.
None of this requires AI.
But nowadays any linear regression qualifies as AI so imma go slap a label on it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
But there is no good reason you can't do that already. Hardware engineers have just been fundamentally unserious about computer use going on 20 years. The PCB design you could do in 2000 already, but now it's still PDF datasheets, people drawing footprints and connecting RX lines to RX lines.
> Cannot retrieve latest commit at this time.
Or is it GitHub Security, stopping us from cloning this dangerous repo?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your common oscilloscope is common ground referenced. You attach to your test circuits ground with the typically black alligator clips coming off the probe and then read voltage at a point with the test lead. A decent differential probe like you might be thinking of usually costs about as much as a decent hobbyist oscilloscope.
Ah well that does simplify things significantly, I suppose it's probably still somewhat useful. But I'd expect a big part of the nets are not connected to the ground? I mean in my hobby designs a majority of them is, but let's say if you generously use decoupling capacitors, then that might not be the case?
Typically, you need dedicated circuitry (and usually inductive coupling) to provide full isolation, but if the circuit is using this layout then you can still choose to ground the normally-isolated side for probing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your common oscilloscope is common ground referenced. You attach to your test circuits ground with the typically black alligator clips coming off the probe and then read voltage at a point with the test lead. A decent differential probe like you might be thinking of usually costs about as much as a decent hobbyist oscilloscope.
Ah well that does simplify things significantly, I suppose it's probably still somewhat useful. But I'd expect a big part of the nets are not connected to the ground? I mean in my hobby designs a majority of them is, but let's say if you generously use decoupling capacitors, then that might not be the case?
A truly "floating" circuit would be something battery powered, or galvanically isolated from mains Earth (e.g. by an isolation transformer).
Can't say I fully understand it but this certainly smells like someone is getting hired off a single github repo as CV
the interesting part is the cost ratio. commercial flying probe setups run 5 figures with proprietary software. this is a weekend build that gets you most of the way there for under 500 bucks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is roughly solved. Tell the agent to do all of its calculations in python.
...OR if you are developing a PCB, you have the design data, and pick and place data and the gerber data. Any combination of such gives you positions of everything within micrometers. This is not a new problem. Testing of PCBs has been solved a billion times over and the world has had bed of nails tester and flying probe testers for 4 decades old. We have a 8 finger flying probe machine at our facility that literally…