- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
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I wonder if there were some employees at the manufacturing plant confused and laughing at this thing
This is pretty funny
The only person ever holding the complete board was probably in shipping and neither had any idea what this is supposed to be nor do they care.
PCBWay actually did a sanity check on my board before production. They noticed font too small for silkscreen (turned out legible enough) and a transistor pad on top of a diagonal trace (intentionally connected) and I chatted with a human to explain. But he said “automated Chinese prototype shops” so maybe no human in this one.
Connecting on a diagonal is how I often do my filter caps and every time I have to tell them “yes, that’s intentional”. Really free up routing
There are artsy, nonfunctional PCBs…
https://ca.rstenpresser.de/blag/2026/01/stonehenge-soldering-challenge/
This one does have a function but some components are only connected with one pad
It is a pastiche of [thing], more than an actual [thing] itself.
This is exactly what “AI” does, this is precisely what it’s for
I could easily see this being a YouTube video, iterating to the point of getting a working PCB. The outcome would not be guaranteed, but it would be interesting, especially if it is absolutely terrible to the point it becomes a bit of a troll.
Sounds like a Michael Reeves video!
I was thinking the same!
Of course they’re a Project Manager.
Product manager, that’s worse
This HAS to be ragebait.
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Dude says in the post that he just wanted to see what happened. If idle experimentation makes one an imbecile, then I suspect your standards for stupidity are out of line with reality.
There’s not much point in sending it to be manufactured when it would fail DRC and a quick visual inspection. Experimenting is fun but there was no point wasting the money to make it when it clearly isn’t a working PCB.
It probably cost 5 dollars max including shipping for a funny joke object.
So you’re saying it generated the schematic and the pcb… and then they didn’t look at all?
Or that they did and didn’t see what was wrong with it?
They absolutely deserve to be the butt of jokes. I bet they let the robot summarise books for them.
He had an ai slop that pcb design out and then had it shipped from China. Even if they’re perfectly fine wasting their own time, shipping isn’t free
Have you ordered things from China? They practically pay you for the shipping.
I wasn’t referring to monetary costs
If you would experiment with PCBs, you would start with using a breadboard, no? This is just throwing money (and wasting resources and time) at something and hoping that something sticks.
But then you wouldn’t have a photo to show the world.
The photo is as good as a 3d render of the PCB in KiCAD.
Physical items are tangible, makes them more memorable.
I read it as satire. Is it not?
It’s a dude just messing around to see what happened.
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Hell, both Gemini and Claude have done well for me in throwing some code together for simple apps, but I still looked it over before running it. I try to do that for even human-made open source code, although at least in principle, if it’s been up a while, others have at least tried it and given feedback.
I’m sure this is just a joke or a proof of the issue; you’d have to look at the PDF or whatever it gives and see that something is way off.
And for the record, the best code that I’ve gotten from an LLM has been the first few runs of an idea, one that was thoroughly explained in the prompt. If you put together a vague prompt and continue to add to it, it will get worse quickly, with the LLM even changing parts that were perfectly fine. Maybe turning the temperature down, if possible, will help with that randomness, but it’s always better to keep sessions short and precise.
I would love to see the looks on the faces of the Chinese laborers making this stupid thing.
Those kids must have been so upset.
Just wait another month bro I promise it will get better bro (every month for the past 4 years)
This amazes me, because there is su much source material the ai could train on … Imitation should be a relatively easy thing for that.
He used Claude which is an LLM, to build a. Circuit board which has not much to do with language. If course it wasn’t trained om PCBs.
Let’s assume they used something like kicad then clause could have learned from the available source files. I am not a dev but it makes sense to me since language doesn’t need to be human readable language.
Wouldn’t this be like asking an LLM to generate and svg image? Yes, technically it’s xml, but will it make sense when it’s rendered? Only if the model was specifically trained to understand svg. I never heard of kicad before, i assume it’s even more niche.
More sense than the believable bullshit it puts out as words? Nope. But enough to create something that resembles a Gerber file.
But maybe the little hallucinations are the backwards USB port …so who knows.
Update V2: “Well, my house burned down”
Push AI button, don’t check, complain about AI, problem is human
This reminds me of the people who trained neural networks on stuff before ChatGPT and uploaded YouTube videos with titles like, “I FORCED an AI to read ALL of twilight, and THIS is what it wrote!” and then they laugh at the garbage that comes out of the model. Like… yeah, the model is not good at this task that it was not designed to do. Some of the text is funny, but in the same way people don’t really emotionally respond to AI art because there was no human intent behind it, I don’t respond to AI “humour”. It’s using a tool wrong and then laughing that the outcome is bad.
There’s satirical comedy to be had here, but it needs to be grounded in what actual people are doing. Personally I haven’t seen anyone seriously expect a language model to be able to assemble a functioning PCB, so I can’t enjoy this as satire either.
Or could it be genuine curiosity, just seeing what happens? Always possible but such a predictable outcome doesn’t tickle my curiosity either.
So, there are all the reasons I didn’t find this interesting. Why did I reply it all? I dunno man.
This reminds me of the people who trained neural networks on stuff before ChatGPT
I did this with Buzzfeed clickbait headlines, not using neural networks, just simple Markov chains.
Yeah sounds about right! And that’s true a lot of it was with Markov models. I think some was NNs though.
C2 also looks useless. Itnlooks like the trace goes in and out on the same side.
All three IC pins are shorted too lol
FYI, the actual circuit properly designed is stupidly simple:
- The 5V and Ground power lines come in from USB on dedicated pins
- Since that’s a USB-C connector you need 2x resistors for it CC lines (they let the USB Host on the other side know that something is connected to it and wants power of a certain maximum current, and to figure out the orientation of the cable since it can be plugged in two orientations)
- To light the LED you need the actual LED and a resistor that limits the current that goes to the LED (since LEDs themselves don’t limit it and without external current limitation they’ll just light up very brightly and then release some “magic smoke” and stop working)
That’s it.
Now, assuming R3 and R4 are properly connect CC line resistors (though WHY THE FUCK are the two lines of R3 routed on the other side of the board!!?), the only two other things needed are R1 and D1, nothing else.
Instead, there are way too many extra components, most notably this thing on the middle, supposedly a microchip (judging by the “U” code, can’t see the actual writting in the device), maybe a voltage regulator but what would be the point!?
Worse, all 3 legs of that U1 device are wired together. If we’re really really lucky, they go nowhere. Otherwise at least one ends up connected to a Ground line (ultimatelly coming from USB) and the other to a power (most likely the 5V from USB) - in other words, it’s a short circuit of the power from USB. Not, just not good, but actually a seriously bad “I’ve never touched electronics in my life” mistake: there is literally no topology where the 3 pins of a 3-pin component are wired together like that, since electrically that’s the same as not having it there at all (so even if connected to something else than 5V + GND, at best that component would never do anything). This is like something you figure out in the first hour of learning Electronics.
This shit is not just a little bad, it’s incredibly bad and probably a danger to connect to anything over USB.
I can see at least one innovation there. Diodes make current go one direction. D1 ensures current goes neither direction.
