Fine. But what does the AI do? It "ingests the project", but what does that mean? Finding all the pins? That's a start. Using a SPICE model to figure out what should be on each pin, and checking? Now that would be impressive. Probably something in between.
The usual use for this sort of thing is that you probe a known-good board to find out what voltages and signals appear where, and then compare with newly manufactured boards. That's a common production check.
There's potential here. If the AI has some concept of what the board under test is doing, and can diagnose problems, that's quite useful.
The way I'm thinking about it is, it's a _workflow_ innovation?
So you ask for data sheets for all the visible chips and get PDFs in an output directory with minimal user interaction except to flip the board, ask for a basic idea of connectivity, get a stitched high res surface image etc.... which of course are all currently possible, but you can do them potentially with very low effort. There doesn't have to be a _software stack_ ahead of time. You ask Claude to do the thing, it will figure out how to do it, write some code, pull in some OSS and make the thing happen. You can take this project's software or leave it.
You might say "tell me where you think the JTAG headers are" and it will come up with a workflow to do its best at that task (most likely with variable results...), but nonetheless this is not a thing you can ask of any commercial product I am aware of today. With probes, stuff can get interesting.
Of course experienced hardware & reverse engineers already can do all this stuff and have a plethora of workflows for it but I still think it's an interesting POC of a generalisable approach. You can take or leave this particular software stack. Also, the hardware barely matters, you can duct tape whatever to whatever.
So I'm wondering how is the second probe problem dealth with. I've considered something similar but with small weight attached to a pogo pin, so the CNC arm could then just move it around, which would not be very easy to get completely reliable as there may be components on the board.
But I'd expect a big part of the nets are not connected to the ground? I mean in my hobby designs a majority of them is, but let's say if you generously use decoupling capacitors, then that might not be the case?
I would assume once machines are set up that this is only really done if you're not confident of your manufacturing line for some reason (eg. maintenance, reconfiguration) or you are pushing limits somewhere, for example, particularly small vias or traces very close to the edge of the board.
To make this useful, you would want two flying probes because otherwise it's not going to be telling you much you don't already know.
[1] https://bayareacircuits.com/bare-printed-circuit-board-elect...
Although, that doesn't stop people raising while pretending it does!
the interesting part is the cost ratio. commercial flying probe setups run 5 figures with proprietary software. this is a weekend build that gets you most of the way there for under 500 bucks.
Isn't that a good thing?
It almost feels like it would benefit from being split into two projects. If I'm testing my own PCBs, I probably don't want an agent in charge, at least not routinely. There's just no reason for the added cost, complexity, or non-determinism. And if I'm reversing someone else's design, then going through the effort of building an auto-prober seems like an overkill, especially since a single probe is seldom enough. Even the simplest serial interface will often have one line for clock and another for data, so you're gonna be manually making connections either way.
Any combination of such gives you positions of everything within micrometers.
This is not a new problem. Testing of PCBs has been solved a billion times over and the world has had bed of nails tester and flying probe testers for 4 decades old.
We have a 8 finger flying probe machine at our facility that literally all we do is load the board in, load in the design data. It identifies points of interests, learns the fiducials and we let it do a characterization run. We then have engineering review of the resulting data and just let it fly afterwards.
None of this requires AI.
But nowadays any linear regression qualifies as AI so imma go slap a label on it.
What a glorious time to be alive.
Claude really is going to bring pleasure to the people.
> New York[1]
[1] https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/keeping-new-yorkers-safe-go...
https://videos.files.wordpress.com/gD3kAWlO/autoprober-demo....
But I am not sure what do I see there? Is that some 3D printing?
Instead of donating to a project one has to buy GPU time to convert it to FOSS.
> Cannot retrieve latest commit at this time.
Or is it GitHub Security, stopping us from cloning this dangerous repo?
Perhaps a smidge disappointed when I had a look and discovered it wasn't that :)
This is genuinely mind blowing.
