I have 15+ years of PCB design experience. Mostly hobby stuff but a fair amount of processional work. Kilowatt range brushless motor controllers, basic RF stuff, lots of microcontroller stuff.

I had Fable design an LED earring. Rechargeable coin cell, RP2350 cpu, IMU, 45 addressable LEDs. It made two mistakes - missed the through holes on the coin cell holder footprint and made the center pad too small. I was able to have JLC swap the through hole battery holder for a surface mount one, and I put a little solder on the small center pad to make it stick up above the mask. They work great! It took 6 days of Fable usage, so about $50 on my Max plan. Very cheap for hardware dev.

I was sufficiently impressed that I’ve been going over old circuit board designs. Some half finished, some completed but in need of a next rev, and I’m getting so much done.

To see it hit the mainstream like the OpenAI announcement, I think big things are coming for this world and by and large they are not ready for it.

For my part, I have always loved PCB design and layout but I simply can’t keep up with the amount of labor required to build what I want, so I welcome this change.

I have also begun exploring more advanced algorithms for PCB manipulation. I have a fairly dense board that needs a few more small chips added. I have an algorithm now that can kinda shuffle and jostle things around so you take up all the spare microns of space across a region of the board and make openings to squeeze a little more in there. It’s pretty cool to see the visualizations as I have it generate movies of the component drift. I foresee much more powerful tools like this in the future.

One tip: have it make a project web page with a chronological list of big changes and detailed visualizations for everything that happens. I can actually prompt all of this on my phone while I am out and about, and view the results on a Tailscale served local page. I’ve always wanted to be able to do PCB design when away from home and now I can!