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"Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"

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Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"

#51

Post by belval »

Not quite the same thing, but recently I want to make adapter clips for connecting powerblocks to a barbell, making them suitable as weights for deadlift/benching. I have fusion 360 experience so I designed something to 3D print as usual, but the issue was that PLA even at 100% infill is pretty unsafe when holding 90lbs blocks.

The logical next step is to use metal, but that's outside of my hobby tools. I found that JLCPCB offered sheet metal fabrication but I had no experience with sheet metal designs. I went to ChatGPT and was actually really impressed by how well it was able to guide me from design to final model file. I received the adapters last week and was really impressed by how nice they turned out.

All of that to say, AI-assisted design is actually lowering the bar of entry for a whole lot of problems and I am quite happy about it.

Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"

#52

Post by PunchyHamster »

mikeayles wrote: post #11

Been 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…

I think Altium tried to do something similar. A bunch of common blocks being able to just plop on the PCB, (auto) route few tracks and done. Failed because there was always something some client wanted to do, move, change or optimize for production run.

Module based design is cool for getting the prototype going but once you get into production you want to optimize everything so it falls apart quickly when you need to move the parts (not blocks, parts) to fit the least possible amount of space, cut components that could be shared (do 8 blocks on one board each with its own decoupling caps need entire set of them? Probably not). Fine for prototyping/hobby stuff/one off but falls apart quickly in production.

Still, having working prototype quickly that can then be optimized in more traditional way can still be very valuable.

> It's the same insight that made software dependencies work. You don't ask ChatGPT to write you a JSON parser from scratch, you ask it which library to use. Hardware should work the same way.

hardware optimising gets you far more money faster than software, because the cost of software not being optimal is mostly cost on the consumer (burning more CPU than it would if it was optimized), while for hardware each chip less is more money left in your pocket and there are actual size constraints that can be pretty hard edged vs software's "well the user will have to download extra MB more"

Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"

#53

Post by walterbell »

mikeayles wrote: post #42
walterbell wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Seems to work, thanks!

Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"

#55

Post by PunchyHamster »

cbdevidal wrote: post #20
JKCalhoun wrote: post #7

Why, 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.

monitor home's phases and just learn AI how to spot patterns to identify each device. I think there was a product doing that already..

Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"

#56

Post by PunchyHamster »

dcrazy wrote: post #27

As an AI skeptic, I’ve been brought around to using Claude Code to understand a codebase, like when I need to quickly find where something happens through a tower of abstractions. Crucially, this relies on Claude actually searching my codebase using grep. It’s effectively automated guess and check. I wonder if a SPICE skill would make LLMs safer and more useful in this area. I’m a complete EE newbie, and I am slowly…

Well, using LLM as search on steroids do have big advantage that hallucinations are easy to spot and don't matter

Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"

#57

Post by jacquesm »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #46
jacquesm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Ah ok! Thanks for that bit of clarification, it makes a world of a difference, yes, you can use the breadboard for that, but - based on my own experience - if you want to actually use an ADC on a breadboard you're going to be in for a world of hurt as soon as you exceed some very low threshold frequency of updating and you're going to be fighting all kinds of weird bias effects. The parasitic capacitance of those breadboards is just terrible.

Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"

#58

Post by burnt-resistor »

bradfa wrote: post #16

If you know what you're doing with electronics design, I've found that leveraging an LLM to help come up with ideas, layout block diagrams, and find parts can be super useful. Integrating Digi-Key or Mouser API support for finding parts pricing and inventory is also super handy. Using the distributor APIs can also allow you to perform natural language search which isn't possible (or isn't easy) through the distributo…

I think the problem with LLMs is they fail to adhere to implicit or explicit constraints. Parts finding functionality of DigiKey is pretty darn good, but it would be awesome to find if there are cheaper equivalent circuits that are functionally equivalent to a particular block, yet again under aforementioned constraints. Multi-component simplification would be awesome so as long as it's safe. AI, so far, is not yet a substitute for review by an expert human.

Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"

#59

Post by estimator7292 »

nospice wrote: post #25
mikeayles wrote: post #11

Been 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…

That's precisely how LLMs work for code, yes. Were you not aware?

Re: "Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"

#60

Post by johnfn »

gopher_space wrote: post #47
nospice wrote: post #25

Earlier 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.

Maybe you can provide some examples of what you would consider to be “novel” code?

The proof of the Erdos problem the other day was called novel by Terrence Tao. That seems novel to me.

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