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danielmorozoffyesterday at 2:04 PM5 repliesview on HN

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


Replies

edg5000today at 4:06 AM

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.

ecesenayesterday at 8:37 PM

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).

animeshchouhanyesterday at 2:11 PM

we're developing https://copperbench.org - an open-source benchmark for evaluating ai agents on real, verifiable hardware design tasks.

ajninyesterday at 2:29 PM

Copperhead directly edits the KiCad files so that is the CLI version of that Astra demo.

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TechSquidTVyesterday at 2:11 PM

This is what I want to know as well. I'm about to kick off a project or two.