Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • Why would somebody ever use a hosted version? I see "One-click gerber, DXF/STEP, render and BOM export" and "Altium support beyond KiCad" in cloud plans, dunno if they are compelling.
    by aitchnyu
  • Can I take the output of this and get a fully assembled board mailed to me? Thats my dream...
    by tylergetsay
  • This is probably not the primary way people use the tool, but if I log in (desktop, Chrome on macOS), click "Start a board" on the sidebar, and go to click any of the inputs, I can't type text in them (the inputs are "Start from an example", "What are you building", and "The brief".
    by jimberlage
  • Might be a better website if it wasn't all clearly AI-copy.

    "Nothing commits without its gate."

    by fwip
  • Has anyone had experience with Copperhead vs Astra and kicad? Looking for a similar tool soon
    by danielmorozoff
  • While this new competency of LLMs in EDA is objectively neat, I can't help but feel a little sad about the way this is going. Electronics projects are my refuge from the new hyper-speed low-quality software world. I want to "just not use it" and continue to enjoy electronics, but if I ever want to turn one of my ideas into a product, I'll be up against people who are building extremely quickly and to a lower quality standard. Yes, potential users of a cool new gadget care about having their problems solved above all else, but I can tell this is going to turn into another field we're all here saying "what happened to craft?" about, and idk, I just don't like it. And this is coming from someone who enjoys (turn by turn) LLM-boosted programming.
    by mlaux
  • The space is definitely heating up.

    Flux.ai being the incumbent Silixon based out of the UK have been showing demos Quilter and DeepPCB for layout The recent OpenAI demo...

    I went the other way and pre-designed sub circuits with a set of rules that allows simple merge assembly, unfortunately I didn't have the time or budget to continue with it, but I took the constrained approach as with hardware, things can't be 99%.

    The one thing I will say, is that my experience of hardware engineers is very gatekeepy.

    Any questions about the use of AI for any form of automation on forums/Reddit get shot down instantly and the OP's told 'skill issue' more or less. In my opinion, just as with software, most work is simple and should be automated, there will always be a need for the real engineering when it comes to high specification work, high volume optimisation and hardware debug (although Claude code is pretty handy at driving a Jlink)

    by mikeayles
  • Many of the new agentic electronic design tools are KiCad-based, which is fine, but for people creating new EDA tools I'd encourage them to take a look at tscircuit (open-source, MIT). KiCad wasn't built for AI-gen with things like automatic routing/placement, supplier footprint orientation checking, connector orientation checking and other features that will be required as more people expect extensive validation for AI-generated designs. KiCad could add these things, but they've got decades of baggage and many Altium features to pull in. I'm worried that we're all getting bound by KiCad s-exprs
    by seveibar

Explore Birbla archives