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  • How reliable was the re-import step? Once you’d placed and routed things manually in KiCad, could you ask Claude for another change without it disturbing that work? Did you need to explicitly mark which parts should stay untouched?
    by vovankuvalda
  • We are working on a similar product http://fabplane.com

    Goal is to make it easy for users to remix circuits, like say you want to make a mod for a retro video game system, you can fork off of an existing mod and just change it, and we guide you through getting it printed at pcbway or jlcpcb.

    by kanwisher
  • Is copperhead related to this Copperbrain project?

    https://github.com/deadbringer17/Copperbrain

    They have similar names, seem to solve similar problems and both have first commit within a few days in July. One is Python and the other Typescript though and they don't seem to be forks.

    by dhon_
  • ChatGPT based naming
    by rrr_oh_man
  • With AI enabled consumer hardware usecases going to explode this is something super relevant. At least 5 startups have pitched their wearables to me and they could definitely use this
    by anirudhojhaanil
  • Will it though? Do you think people will actually be more creative with this or will we get yet another e-ink device with a slightly different form factor, or a "less than a phone" with different constraints?

    In the end is the PCB design the bottleneck to create new devices or is it mostly about available components and their price?

    by utopiah
  • Design for Manufacturability (DFM) will determine if they generate a viable product. Hardware is difficult, with a success rate around 1:66 for a startup.

    It is a good idea to consult with a contract manufacturer engineering team early, and stop wasting peoples time including their own.

    I have also seen people re-brand China pad-printed generic products, and claim they needed investor help buying a shipping container full of cheap stuff or outright e-waste. Careful, especially if you see multiple versions or the same product pop up at the same time. Best of luck =3

    by Joel_Mckay
  • 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
  • soon :)
    by animeshchouhan
  • Pretty much with the JLC plugin to KiCad.
    by 4b11b4
  • Yes.

    Look at jlcpcb or other Chinese assembly houses. If you stay within their component library it is dead easy, just upload your gerber and BOM, and you can have assembled boards within a week or so. Slightly more difficult if they have to order parts for your BOM, but still not really that hard.

    by dghlsakjg
  • I did that with Codex+Sol alone, and made something even more complex in less time with Codex+Astra over the weekend.

    Its maybe more hands on than you want it to be, but you mostly just need to supervise the work. But yes, the CAD outputs go directly to the JLCPCB ordering form, or whereever you fab

    by ac29
  • It seems like this is just controlling KiCad. Assuming this produces a BOM as well, you could take the output files, send them to a board house like PCBWay or JLPCB and get the boards stuffed and shipped to you.

    The board houses may have questions for you that may be difficult for you to answer, but theoretically you could answer those with AI and get fully assembled boards delivered right to your doorstep.

    by seidleroni
  • 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
  • If you scroll down they want you to "Connect copperhead to GitHub first." The bottom should have a page where you can give them access to a repo for handling stuff.
    by mrnotcrazy
  • Might be a better website if it wasn't all clearly AI-copy.

    "Nothing commits without its gate."

    by fwip
  • the website isn't the product. try copperhead and judge the engineering :)
    by animeshchouhan
  • Has anyone had experience with Copperhead vs Astra and kicad? Looking for a similar tool soon
    by danielmorozoff
  • This is what I want to know as well. I'm about to kick off a project or two.
    by TechSquidTV
  • Copperhead directly edits the KiCad files so that is the CLI version of that Astra demo.
    by ajnin
  • I recommend having the LLM write Skidl, which generates a netlist, which you import in the PCB editor, which the LLM then reviews. Routing itself I think would require code-driven routing (expressing board via layout constraints, kinda like UI constraints/CSS) which does not exist yet.
    by edg5000
  • I do not have experience with Copperhead, but I made 2 PCBs with Claude. He made a py script that generates Kicad sources, I ended up generating all files (in particular schematics and PCB) from a shared netlist, and use Kicad cli to validate and generate gerbers.

    I manufactured both PCBs via PCBWay (Claude also red all the specs and configured the constraints accordingly) and both work. I'm pretty impressed, especially because I've never done a PCB myself and didn't know I could.

    What I was doing manually, co-working with Claude, was placing and routing (I was doing those via Kicad, then saving, then Claude was re-importing my work in his py files).

    by ecesena
  • we're developing https://copperbench.org - an open-source benchmark for evaluating ai agents on real, verifiable hardware design tasks.
    by animeshchouhan
  • 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
  • My experience with hardware engineers, at least IRL, is very different. They love to talk about their work. However, I used to be an EE so that probably helps.

    As for Reddit, there's a lot of "bury head in sand and problem will go away" behavior when it comes to AI. People are understandably worried about their jobs, but they're certainly not doing themselves any favors by downplaying AI or looking for "tech niches where AI isn't yet."

    Copperhead is very interesting. I do some embedded systems consulting on the side, but I've never enjoyed PCB layout very much. I briefly investigated using AI for it the last time I had to do a board, but it wasn't very helpful.

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

    Stay away from Reddit and forums if you want to see where the open minded people are looking. There are a lot of communities where EEs are experimenting with newer technologies and sharing their results, with realistic appraisals of what can be done.

    You also need to understand the history of autorouting technology for PCBs. Autorouters with auto layout have been around in many forms for years. Their output never compares to a skilled EE doing it manually. The gap between autorouter output and skilled operator output is even bigger than the gap between a good developer and average AI codegen slop.

    I’m interested in this space, but even the Fable/Astra or dedicated tools like Quilter, Flux, and others have a very, very long way to go for boards more complex than simple hobby boards.

    I do think this is going to be good for hobby people doing simple PCBs though

    by Aurornis
  • 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