| Btw, you guys are violating the ViewCube patent that Autodesk has. You should be careful.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US7782319B2/en It's why we never implemented it in KiCad, and why Blender has a "2d drawn navigation controller" instead of 3d drawn. But yea, I'm not the biggest fan of the Flux approach but maybe I'm too traditionist. I'm a big fan of _understanding_ the design. Yes, I can even use a code gen to generate a fuck ton of boilerplate now with AI. But do I actually know what it's doing? At a surface level sure, at the indepth level? Ugh I don't look. The penalty of using AI at hardware is the designer loses any forced motivation to actually understand what they are designing. This is critical to be able to troubleshoot designs, and even do things like worse case failure analysis and anything fancier. For simple designs, sure, you probably don't care or need to know much about a LM317 linear regulator putting 5V to a terminal block. For advanced designs, from my and many others experience, the problem escalates to chips having undocumented errata and even datasheets just being wrong. If you don't read the datasheet in the first place in the design, you'll be even more lost trying to figure out what's going on. You ultimately have to reach out to the semiconductor vendor and go back and forth, but if you don't even have that starting knowledge you aren't going to be very productive doing so. Otherwise if I want a generated design for something simple, I could just use TI's WebBench and the like to generate them, no AI required :shrug:. I still get bit once in awhile with regulators that have compensation loop issues contrary to the datasheet the generator was based on. Hah. |
Oddly, this is exactly the type of person for whom AI will result in a failure. You can get AI to generate this bit and instantly know how to integrate it and if it's got a major error/oversight.
I literally tried to do this with a 9V battery and a vape cartridge (simple resistance load) to jerry-rig a vape whose power source had died but the rest worked fine. I had a box of all the most common op-amps, transistors, and some voltage regulators. Also plenty of other passives on-hand, pretty much anything that could be needed. I asked a variety of AI's including ChatGPT-4 and Flux.ai to design this for me. But none of them worked for providing enough current, or even generally the right voltage.
And I didn't know enough about electronics to know what wasn't working.
I use AI a lot in software programming. But I use it for the basic, boring boilerplate stuff that I just don't want to type. It frees up my time and brainpower to spend on the hard parts with trickier data structures and algorithms where there's no "right" answer, just different trade-offs. Using AI for the simple stuff is easy because I can quickly read the code that is output and instantly find any errors before I copy/paste it into my work. But if I ask the AI to make something complicated, it can take awhile for me to see where the errors are, or that there's a subtle structural problem with the architecture that's making things far more complex than they need to be. These parts are better hand-crafted.