Guy builds AI driven hardware hacker arm from duct tape, old cam and CNC machine

> digitally guided fabrication

> New York[1]

[1] https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/keeping-new-yorkers-safe-go...

Interesting. Not clear what it really does. The hardware is an oscilloscope probe on a 3-axis CNC mechanism. That's called a "flying probe", and you can buy one.[1]

Fine. But what does the AI do? It "ingests the project", but what does that mean? Finding all the pins? That's a start. Using a SPICE model to figure out what should be on each pin, and checking? Now that would be impressive. Probably something in between.

The usual use for this sort of thing is that you probe a known-good board to find out what voltages and signals appear where, and then compare with newly manufactured boards. That's a common production check.

There's potential here. If the AI has some concept of what the board under test is doing, and can diagnose problems, that's quite useful.

[1] https://huntron.com/products/access2.htm

Can't say I fully understand it but this certainly smells like someone is getting hired off a single github repo as CV

It's both cool and a bit confusing. Is this an attempt to commoditize flying-probe testing for PCBs? An attempt to use LLMs to reverse-engineer circuits? Both?

It almost feels like it would benefit from being split into two projects. If I'm testing my own PCBs, I probably don't want an agent in charge, at least not routinely. There's just no reason for the added cost, complexity, or non-determinism. And if I'm reversing someone else's design, then going through the effort of building an auto-prober seems like an overkill, especially since a single probe is seldom enough. Even the simplest serial interface will often have one line for clock and another for data, so you're gonna be manually making connections either way.

Wow that's nuts. What a great idea! I wonder how much of this the commercial flying probe machines can do already. Pretty cool to be able to have this on a home scale.

Maybe put the probe on a spring loaded linear sensor, and move down until it hits a target offset (could just be read by a simple flag in an optical sensor)-- resulting in hitting a constant target force.

This is amazing! Limitation breeds creativity indeed

How does this only have a single star.

This is genuinely mind blowing.