I'm excited by the option in Astra to route PCBs.

The next pain-point is sourcing the components from Digikey, LCSC, etc., and finding suitable substitutes if necessary.

Of course this assumes the LLMs can already read datasheets because that's the biggest pain-point in designing electronics. It's like filling out tax forms.

Finally it would be great if LLMs could extract simulation models from datasheets!

  > I'm excited by the option in Astra to route PCBs.

I know a startup [1] that tries to accomplish this.

[1] https://www.schematik.io/

I have found that AI is great for sorting out your libraries, drawing and helping double check footprints managing your BOM. I still draw my schematics and layout my boards. I haven’t found it any good for those tasks yet. There are too many stupid errors it makes. I do get it to review my work though and often it catches things I have missed.

Just as some anecdatum, I've tried this a couple of times over the last few years. 2024-2025, no body could generate anything of any sort of complexity, however maybe around the Opus 4.7 timeline, I tried having it generate some relatively simple and one slightly more complex circuit around 8-bit PIC micros, and was very pleasantly surprised. The schematics for simpler stuff is usually OK, often with some of the kind of crazy belt-and-suspenders stuff you see in code (how many decoupling caps do I actually need here, Claude?), and PCB layout has basically been terrible every time I've tried it.

Recent models can generate mostly competent schematics if you're using well known parts, feed them data sheets (and you _must_ feed them the errata too) and it's not too complex. Any complexity analog or RF, everything falls down quickly if you know what you're looking at. Maybe Astra will do better? There's still so much implicit knowledge that a good designer (not me by a long shot, but I know a little) will bake into a board, and even as cheap as JCLPCB is now, you don't want to have to spin a half dozen revs because Claude or Codex hallucinated. It will be genuinely interesting to see what happens on this front.

Have tried this a few times. While AI has been helpful in talking through component choices and other topics, it’s consistently been a spectacular fail each time in actually designing the board.

I’ve had similar results asking AI to design 3D models for 3D printing.

“Coach me on optimizing error on my printer”… helps.

“Build me a print ready file to these specs.”… it’s like a drunk cat attacked my computer. Just confidently puts out total nonsense.

I think the new Astra computer use demos show that the models might be able to do things like inspection of real world objects if given a camera.

Super excited to see real world feedback added into the agent loops we have gotten used to working with. Could you let the model print and test the circuit boards it is prototyping with a jig?

If you give it a real solver to drive and business constraints to operate under, it will do pretty good job (which is to map your business rules to constraints and balanced costs, develop deterministic tests, probabilistic tests, acceptance gates, all boring stuff).

I have tried to use AI on this from GPT3, documenting a few of the attempts on my blog. They know the datasheets and the theory enough to be extremely useful at the start, but the most recent ones are becoming scary good. Routing a PCB is certainly a bit more than joining some wires, you have to accommodate power traces, ground loops, component overlap and all the various RF tricks and tips, but I do believe we are less than a year from prompt to full assembly including enclosure.

I got a flexpcb that validates in JLC and PCBWay DRC tools from the KiCAD MCP Server and Codex.

I have yet to order any or program it, but it was enough to make me push on with a PCB art project for ST-style guitar pickguards - no netlist, no problems.

I'm also foolishly toying with NeXTBus dev boards for the Cube. Is it cursed? Probably. https://github.com/itomato/NeXTBus-Dev-Board