Show HN: Copperhead – Cursor for circuit boards (copperhead.sh)

Stay away from Reddit and forums if you want to see where the open minded people are looking. There are a lot of communities where EEs are experimenting with newer technologies and sharing their results, with realistic appraisals of what can be done.

You also need to understand the history of autorouting technology for PCBs. Autorouters with auto layout have been around in many forms for years. Their output never compares to a skilled EE doing it manually. The gap between autorouter output and skilled operator output is even bigger than the gap between a good developer and average AI codegen slop.

I’m interested in this space, but even the Fable/Astra or dedicated tools like Quilter, Flux, and others have a very, very long way to go for boards more complex than simple hobby boards.

I do think this is going to be good for hobby people doing simple PCBs though

As for Reddit, there's a lot of "bury head in sand and problem will go away" behavior when it comes to AI. People are understandably worried about their jobs, but they're certainly not doing themselves any favors by downplaying AI or looking for "tech niches where AI isn't yet."

Copperhead is very interesting. I do some embedded systems consulting on the side, but I've never enjoyed PCB layout very much. I briefly investigated using AI for it the last time I had to do a board, but it wasn't very helpful.

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).

The board houses may have questions for you that may be difficult for you to answer, but theoretically you could answer those with AI and get fully assembled boards delivered right to your doorstep.

Look at jlcpcb or other Chinese assembly houses. If you stay within their component library it is dead easy, just upload your gerber and BOM, and you can have assembled boards within a week or so. Slightly more difficult if they have to order parts for your BOM, but still not really that hard.

Its maybe more hands on than you want it to be, but you mostly just need to supervise the work. But yes, the CAD outputs go directly to the JLCPCB ordering form, or whereever you fab

It is a good idea to consult with a contract manufacturer engineering team early, and stop wasting peoples time including their own.

I have also seen people re-brand China pad-printed generic products, and claim they needed investor help buying a shipping container full of cheap stuff or outright e-waste. Careful, especially if you see multiple versions or the same product pop up at the same time. Best of luck =3

In the end is the PCB design the bottleneck to create new devices or is it mostly about available components and their price?

Software moves so fast that its actually an anti feature. Libraries and SDKs measure lifetime support in years, but industrial hardware support *at minimum* is a decade. A lot of these new startups dont understand that established industry wont use them unless they known this shiny new system wont ve abandoned in a few years.

On the other hand, softwate devs trying to quickly make a product have something to get them going.