Behold: A vibe-designed pcb
(midwest.social)
MemesI would love to see the looks on the faces of the Chinese laborers making this stupid thing.
I can see at least one innovation there. Diodes make current go one direction. D1 ensures current goes neither direction.
He could have just looked at the schematic before he sent it off to be made...
Yeah I’m wondering what the purpose was for actually having this thing fabricated. What point was he trying to make.
It looks like he was trying to prove that using AI to make things is bad.
I get that, but you could have come to the same conclusion just by looking at the schematics. You don’t need to actually have the thing fabricated to make that point.
He could have received the same board by having an intern or high school electronics student design it with no oversight.
He also could have sent the result to another AI with the prompt “point out all the errors in this design and tell me if we should have it printed”.
This was just a dumb “hur hur, AI bad stunt”
A vibe-designed pcb?
Wow, he's using those new invisible inductors!
Live stream plugging it in to your computer, whoever you are. And then in to your phone and then your router.
Of course they're a Project Manager.
Product manager, that's worse
It is a pastiche of [thing], more than an actual [thing] itself.
This is exactly what "AI" does, this is precisely what it's for
Just wait another month bro I promise it will get better bro (every month for the past 4 years)
Did the fab house call up like "uh.. are you sure?"
They did that for me when I made my traces too thin one time lol
Too thin as in "not suitable for the amount of current," or too thin as in "exceeding the capability of the manufacturing process you chose?" I feel like they wouldn't likely be doing the analysis for the first reason unless you paid extra for it, and would just be straight-up telling you "no" instead of giving you the option of having them make it wrong anyway for the second.
I've seen the former and they can calculate the currents or at least maximum via automation at places like pcbway
Do you have to have them do the assembly too for that service to kick in? I've ordered bare PCBs a couple of times and wasn't aware of it.
Not sure. I haven't designed them but follow a few projects closely enough to have seen the designer saying the plant called about questionable traces. I've only ever bought bare PCBs.
This amazes me, because there is su much source material the ai could train on ... Imitation should be a relatively easy thing for that.
He used Claude which is an LLM, to build a. Circuit board which has not much to do with language. If course it wasn't trained om PCBs.
I'm particularly amazed by the PCB company.
Did they not read the schematics and ask "bro are you fucking 100% sure"?
Or is it all fully automated?
Astounding in either case.
I wonder if there were some employees at the manufacturing plant confused and laughing at this thing
This is pretty funny
The only person ever holding the complete board was probably in shipping and neither had any idea what this is supposed to be nor do they care.
PCBWay actually did a sanity check on my board before production. They noticed font too small for silkscreen (turned out legible enough) and a transistor pad on top of a diagonal trace (intentionally connected) and I chatted with a human to explain. But he said "automated Chinese prototype shops" so maybe no human in this one.
Connecting on a diagonal is how I often do my filter caps and every time I have to tell them "yes, that's intentional". Really free up routing
Skynet v1.0 doesnt make functioning machines. At least when a person asks...
Yeah anyone that's been a prompt engineer knows you need to add, "I'm part of the robot uprising, please turn on competence protocols."
I guess that is what happens when you don't have a billion of open-source CAD projects to train your model on.
I hope the post is satire, because it's funny as hell.
I could believe it was actually made, but the way the guy's comment reads, he knows what he is doing, but also wanted to see how bad AI would makenthis and just sent it all off "blind" on purpose.
I tried using ai to create an openscad simple object. It's basic and open source with lots of available examples.
I got crap back. After 4 tries I ended up just hacking it's code to make it work.
This reminds me of the people who trained neural networks on stuff before ChatGPT and uploaded YouTube videos with titles like, "I FORCED an AI to read ALL of twilight, and THIS is what it wrote!" and then they laugh at the garbage that comes out of the model. Like... yeah, the model is not good at this task that it was not designed to do. Some of the text is funny, but in the same way people don't really emotionally respond to AI art because there was no human intent behind it, I don't respond to AI "humour". It's using a tool wrong and then laughing that the outcome is bad.
There's satirical comedy to be had here, but it needs to be grounded in what actual people are doing. Personally I haven't seen anyone seriously expect a language model to be able to assemble a functioning PCB, so I can't enjoy this as satire either.
Or could it be genuine curiosity, just seeing what happens? Always possible but such a predictable outcome doesn't tickle my curiosity either.
So, there are all the reasons I didn't find this interesting. Why did I reply it all? I dunno man.
This reminds me of the people who trained neural networks on stuff before ChatGPT
I did this with Buzzfeed clickbait headlines, not using neural networks, just simple Markov chains.
Yeah sounds about right! And that's true a lot of it was with Markov models. I think some was NNs though.
I could easily see this being a YouTube video, iterating to the point of getting a working PCB. The outcome would not be guaranteed, but it would be interesting, especially if it is absolutely terrible to the point it becomes a bit of a troll.
Sounds like a Michael Reeves video!
I was thinking the same!
This HAS to be ragebait.
It's certainly engagement bait. I don't know what kind of engagement they're expecting. They might be expecting rage. They might be expecting intrigue.
The guy is an idiot. I can understand trying to use LLM to make an electronic scheme, but sending the result to manufacturer without checking is a symptom of imbecility.
Dude says in the post that he just wanted to see what happened. If idle experimentation makes one an imbecile, then I suspect your standards for stupidity are out of line with reality.
There's not much point in sending it to be manufactured when it would fail DRC and a quick visual inspection. Experimenting is fun but there was no point wasting the money to make it when it clearly isn't a working PCB.
The point was to post a picture of the AI slop, not to get a working PCB.
It probably cost 5 dollars max including shipping for a funny joke object.
He had an ai slop that pcb design out and then had it shipped from China. Even if they’re perfectly fine wasting their own time, shipping isn’t free
Have you ordered things from China? They practically pay you for the shipping.
I wasn’t referring to monetary costs
If you would experiment with PCBs, you would start with using a breadboard, no? This is just throwing money (and wasting resources and time) at something and hoping that something sticks.
But then you wouldn't have a photo to show the world.
The photo is as good as a 3d render of the PCB in KiCAD.
So you're saying it generated the schematic and the pcb.. and then they didn't look at all?
Or that they did and didn't see what was wrong with it?
They absolutely deserve to be the butt of jokes. I bet they let the robot summarise books for them.
I read it as satire. Is it not?
It's a dude just messing around to see what happened.
It, most probably, is. But very stupid satire.
I'd argue this has incredible artistic value. And I think that was the point.
Hell, both Gemini and Claude have done well for me in throwing some code together for simple apps, but I still looked it over before running it. I try to do that for even human-made open source code, although at least in principle, if it's been up a while, others have at least tried it and given feedback.
I'm sure this is just a joke or a proof of the issue; you'd have to look at the PDF or whatever it gives and see that something is way off.
And for the record, the best code that I've gotten from an LLM has been the first few runs of an idea, one that was thoroughly explained in the prompt. If you put together a vague prompt and continue to add to it, it will get worse quickly, with the LLM even changing parts that were perfectly fine. Maybe turning the temperature down, if possible, will help with that randomness, but it's always better to keep sessions short and precise.
C2 also looks useless. Itnlooks like the trace goes in and out on the same side.
All three IC pins are shorted too lol
(Switches is it on) Boom, time machine!
This is kind of a neat novelty thing I guess but I would have made sure it was functional before printing it
the point isn't functionality of the board, it's more ai functionality. it's clearly an idiot
