You are right. What I meant in my conclusion was more about : "I will use these tools to generate parts of a project I don't necessarily care about." I already started learning about proper PCB design, and I am actively fighting against choosing an LLM instead of grasping a concept fully. It's something I am struggling with, but all this is new for most of us. Hoping I will find a good balance at the end. Thanks for your remarks :)
Fair enough. I think there is great value to using LLMs to assist in learning new hobbies, helping lessen the friction, and doing research. I just think it's sad if you let them replace your thinking completely instead of augmenting it. Cheers for the human-written blog post, I did enjoy reading it.
> I think there is great value to using LLMs to assist in learning new hobbies, helping lessen the friction, and doing research
Claude (web) saved me a ton of money with a new hobby. I was curious about astrophotography and had a budget to fill in any missing pieces from my existing photography kit. The conclusion was basically: "get a $20 intervalometer and a wall-wart battery[1]. The lenses you've got are fine, the tripod you've got is fine, and hey good news, Jupyter and Venus are near conjunction so if you can find somewhere dark where you can shoot to the west, you can get a pretty cool timelapse this weekend"
Later on also provided some rough guidelines for the partial lunar eclipse that resulted in some pretty amazing photos.
Since then I have been doing a bit of research on getting a real mount, so that initial budget will probably get used, but it'll be a) for kit that I genuinely don't have yet and b) spent after I've already confirmed that I thoroughly enjoy going out and photographing the stars for hours and then stitching all those photos into timelapses or other neat stacks.
[1] I'm not sure what the right name is for this. One end is battery-shaped but has a wire that plugs into a wall-wart instead of having to switch batteries. I had an existing 500-Wh 120V battery bank thing and it was more than enough to run the camera for 6 hours.
Your post and the link to KiCadRoutingTools is going to result in me finishing a project I started 6 months ago and have just let sit and linger because, like you point out, it was only the boring parts left. Fable found a bit of a showstopper in my design yesterday (an LDO that was right near its limits) and suggested a replacement, Opus filled in all of the missing pull-up/pull-down resistor values, double-checked all of the decoupling caps, and then did floor planning on the PCB side. I just installed KiCadRoutingTools and am getting close to happy with the state of the board and will likely be ordering them tomorrow!
- The first board, which I had already done manual schematic capture, floor planning, and some routing on (but then I lost steam and it’s been sitting at 90% for 6 months) was finished quite readily by Opus + KiCadRoutingTools.
- A second significantly more complex board that has been sitting at the “I’ve done a bunch of planning in Obsidian but haven’t started schematic capture yet” stage… Fable took my Markdown notes, asked questions to fill in the blanks, and put together a plan. Opus first put together a very ugly schematic (essentially all of the parts but no wires between them, just net connections) which then got refined into a nicer-ish schematic. Floor planning went smoothly, the first cut was decent and with a little bit of manual refinement it got somewhere pretty good. Currently routing and still debating a bit between 4-layer and 6-layer. The BGA escapes seem to be causing the majority of the problems right now; originally Opus decided that 4-layer wasn’t feasible due to not being able to even route all the nets, switched to 6-layer, did better but still ended up with like 70 unroutable nets. A bit of back and forth led to revising the BGA fan-out and now we’re back at looking at whether a 4-layer board might be feasible.
For the second one, I’m not 100% sure whether wall-clock-time this is a faster process than it would’ve been to do manually, but… the initial 4-layer attempts were all done while I was out for a date with my wife, the remaining 4-layer attempts ran overnight, the first 6-layer routing attempt was done while I was having my coffee this morning, and now the 4-layer/6-layer fanout changes are being done while I run errands. Something I find especially interesting is that by leaning on KiCadRoutingTools, it looks like there’s actually very little token usage at the routing stage; the plan gets put together as Python + KiCadRoutingTools instructions and then the hard work is done by that tooling. LLM picks up the results, looks at it, tweaks, kicks off a new job. That’s a pretty interesting result; this has all been running on my laptop pretty much continuously for 15 hours and I’m nowhere near any of my usage limits.
I researched a bit on how to manufacture PCBs at home, and i came across Voltera V one. The price is indeed way too high, but I am hoping somebody will make a foss version of it. There are already pretty interesting foss PnP machines.
For a 2-layer pcb I would either go chemical etching or a small routing cnc. Chemical etching kits , uv lamps and blank pcbs are not "too" expensive, but it's more of a professional setup than a hobbyist. Just think of all the PCBs yoi can send to manufacture (and with 4 layers and more) for the price of even getting half the stuff.
At current PCB prices that's kinda not worth it. Hell, even actual assembly isn't that expensive (at least if you have "a lot of few components" vs "big variety of components").
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