Has anyone had experience with Copperhead vs Astra and kicad? Looking for a similar tool soon
I do not have experience with Copperhead, but I made 2 PCBs with Claude. He made a py script that generates Kicad sources, I ended up generating all files (in particular schematics and PCB) from a shared netlist, and use Kicad cli to validate and generate gerbers.
I manufactured both PCBs via PCBWay (Claude also red all the specs and configured the constraints accordingly) and both work. I'm pretty impressed, especially because I've never done a PCB myself and didn't know I could.
What I was doing manually, co-working with Claude, was placing and routing (I was doing those via Kicad, then saving, then Claude was re-importing my work in his py files).
we're developing https://copperbench.org - an open-source benchmark for evaluating ai agents on real, verifiable hardware design tasks.
Copperhead directly edits the KiCad files so that is the CLI version of that Astra demo.
This is what I want to know as well. I'm about to kick off a project or two.
I recommend having the LLM write Skidl, which generates a netlist, which you import in the PCB editor, which the LLM then reviews. Routing itself I think would require code-driven routing (expressing board via layout constraints, kinda like UI constraints/CSS) which does not exist yet.