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by reaperman
847 days ago
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> 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. 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. |
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The boilerplate isn't stuff you generally need AI for really if you are working professionally in electrical. You just pull-up a premade "design block" your company has standardized on.
One of the big things in electrical is you aren't reinventing the wheel each time in your design once you have products going. You re-use parts especially to get long term economy of scale pricing benefits from part vendors by using the same parts more often. This is for everything from ICs to capacitors.
These design blocks extend so far that not only could you drop in pre-made schematic circuits but also premade layout chunks in the CAD tools.
That's if you don't just open an existing schematic and just rename it to your new schematic and make changes hah
And once your overall design gets boilerplate enough, you just get outsourced. It's why no consumer and industrial power supply module design occurs in the US. That stuff has been outsourced to basically 3 or 4 Taiwanese and Chinese OEMs that just copy and paste the same design into different form factors.