Show HN: Copperhead – Cursor for circuit boards

Many of the new agentic electronic design tools are KiCad-based, which is fine, but for people creating new EDA tools I'd encourage them to take a look at tscircuit (open-source, MIT). KiCad wasn't built for AI-gen with things like automatic routing/placement, supplier footprint orientation checking, connector orientation checking and other features that will be required as more people expect extensive validation for AI-generated designs. KiCad could add these things, but they've got decades of baggage and many Altium features to pull in. I'm worried that we're all getting bound by KiCad s-exprs

While this new competency of LLMs in EDA is objectively neat, I can't help but feel a little sad about the way this is going. Electronics projects are my refuge from the new hyper-speed low-quality software world. I want to "just not use it" and continue to enjoy electronics, but if I ever want to turn one of my ideas into a product, I'll be up against people who are building extremely quickly and to a lower quality standard. Yes, potential users of a cool new gadget care about having their problems solved above all else, but I can tell this is going to turn into another field we're all here saying "what happened to craft?" about, and idk, I just don't like it. And this is coming from someone who enjoys (turn by turn) LLM-boosted programming.

The space is definitely heating up.

Flux.ai being the incumbent Silixon based out of the UK have been showing demos Quilter and DeepPCB for layout The recent OpenAI demo...

I went the other way and pre-designed sub circuits with a set of rules that allows simple merge assembly, unfortunately I didn't have the time or budget to continue with it, but I took the constrained approach as with hardware, things can't be 99%.

The one thing I will say, is that my experience of hardware engineers is very gatekeepy.

Any questions about the use of AI for any form of automation on forums/Reddit get shot down instantly and the OP's told 'skill issue' more or less. In my opinion, just as with software, most work is simple and should be automated, there will always be a need for the real engineering when it comes to high specification work, high volume optimisation and hardware debug (although Claude code is pretty handy at driving a Jlink)

We are working on a similar product http://fabplane.com

Goal is to make it easy for users to remix circuits, like say you want to make a mod for a retro video game system, you can fork off of an existing mod and just change it, and we guide you through getting it printed at pcbway or jlcpcb.

Has anyone had experience with Copperhead vs Astra and kicad? Looking for a similar tool soon

Is copperhead related to this Copperbrain project?

https://github.com/deadbringer17/Copperbrain

They have similar names, seem to solve similar problems and both have first commit within a few days in July. One is Python and the other Typescript though and they don't seem to be forks.

This is probably not the primary way people use the tool, but if I log in (desktop, Chrome on macOS), click "Start a board" on the sidebar, and go to click any of the inputs, I can't type text in them (the inputs are "Start from an example", "What are you building", and "The brief".

I really want to like this but the AI written copy is painful. "The problem, and who hurts". Me that's who, come on guys.

Just regular coding agents are really good with Skidl schematics and can review layouts well. I'm not sure why you'd want a specialised environment for this.

Why would somebody ever use a hosted version? I see "One-click gerber, DXF/STEP, render and BOM export" and "Altium support beyond KiCad" in cloud plans, dunno if they are compelling.

Can I take the output of this and get a fully assembled board mailed to me? Thats my dream...

"hardware as fast as software". Please no, lol.

I've imagined a chip running as slow as python.

With AI enabled consumer hardware usecases going to explode this is something super relevant. At least 5 startups have pitched their wearables to me and they could definitely use this

Might be a better website if it wasn't all clearly AI-copy.

"Nothing commits without its gate."

Interested in the evaluations of anyone actually using this.

I tested over the weekend and Astra can

- create and modify schematics from instructions - place components and route traces

out of the box, just via normal 'computer use'. I'm not satisfied with the routing but it isn't terrible.

it would propably help thousands of ppl ngl

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Let me know when I can build my own Cerebras chips, because we're never going to see them as consumers, otherwise.

Yes yes, I know, leagues apart. Still though... One can dream.

https://github.com/i2cjak/T3CAD seems like another promising project

I used claude and gemini to edit/debug kicad schematics. And it was pretty good. What is the point of this agent?

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