AI (Artificial Intelligence)

Not everyone is optimistic:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/01/tech/geoffrey-hinton-leaves-google-ai-fears/index.html

Things get really funny, if AI references publshed but unverified gibberisch from itself or other AI sources.
Positive feedback with a negative effect.

Fully automated self drive will work in two months. Since 2014 (or so).

I think AI will struggle to spot errors in datasheets and the often very misleading presentation of data. You need to looks at graphs and the small print notes very carefully.

I also don’t see how AI will avoid the biases of many designers which have been regurgitated in so many books and articles. Things like single point grounding, Intel vs Apple, ferrous component leads etc etc

I read this interesting article about how the major impacts resulting from the Gutenberg printing press didn’t happen until hundreds of years later. And he mentions that the internet is only a few decades old so we haven’t even begun to see its impact. But an early one might be the recent surge in AI due to the internet making large amounts of textual/image data available for training.

So we’re only in the fetal stage of something that sprang from the infantile stage of the internet. Right now, any attempt to say what will be possible or impossible to do is just a guess, and anybody who guesses right will just be lucky.

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These guys route Kicad pcbs with AI.

Check the video available there.

I noticed this is only routing tracks but the human still has to do the hard part, the footprint placement.

I suppose it has to to start somewhere.

parts placement is an easy task if you are not going to route the board yourself.

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The EEVblog regulars were not impressed several months ago: EEVblog 1535 - DeepPCB AI AutoRouting TESTED! - Page 1

Anyway, those wanting further discussion should head there, since this is drifting off-topic for a KiCad forum.

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So it appears those who are not retired still have jobs designing PCBs. :sweat_smile:

even If that works we can keep working… the result is a really poor looking design… here, we are after form and beauty not an entangled mess of wires. :laughing:

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And did you notice the two unrouted nets in the demo ?

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The AI entity is trying to outsmart the designer by running the FreeRouter in the backstage, haha

That might not be a bad idea. The knock on autorouters is the amount of setup they need to get good results. If the AI can do a smart setup and let the autorouter handle the detailed routing, that might be a win.

this AI could also have access to a better computer or be able to parallelize having different seeds to start with and then compare different results to present us with the best one… perhaps they were already doing this since they said the process takes 24h to return the results.

AI advertises in Airtasker for someone in a cheap country to do the work. :rofl:

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I don’t think that is high up on the list of most KiCad developers or forum users (yet?). AI will probably eventually be more successful at that than (conceited) engineers (not all, of course).

24h for 250 airwires is not really impressive, an experienced PCB designer should be able to do this in a lot less time (talking about working hours here). only advantage I see for now is, that the tool does not need to take breaks :upside_down_face:

Apparently recently added some AI (copilot):

https://diyodemag.com/reviews/better_pcb_electronics_hardware_design_with_flux_ai


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