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by guff_se 19 days ago
” Note: I have not generated the fab package since I have not actually fabricated the board and tested it for functionality. Build this board at your own risk.”

You mean: ”I just asked Fable to one shot this and have no idea if it actually works”?

3 comments

Eric is a very well-known reverse engineering hobbyist. He's RE'd several boards over the past several years, all are on his github. He also has built several novel designs from scratch (Such as the Graphics Gremlin - a FPGA-based MDA/CGA card that outputs to a VGA monitor).
You didn't mention that he also co-authored the book "Open Circuits" that shows cross sectional images of a wide variety of electrical and electronic components. The pictures are beautiful.

His "secret" is basically sanding. Lots and lots of sanding.

https://www.amazon.com/Open-Circuits-Beauty-Electronic-Compo...

Cool.

Still doesn't change the fact that this is an untested board design that relies on a difficult-to-source obsolete chip.

If some pins are swapped by mistake e.g. power and ground you are screwed.

Caveat emptor — unfortunately this was buried in the description.

This is open-source hardware, caveat emptor is implied.

At this stage in a project like this, I’d expect the people who were getting boards fabbed to also have the skills to sanity check the schematics and layout before they sent the gerbers off to China.

That’s a fairly unreasonable take. We are talking about a hobbyist Github account reverse engineering decades old hardware. The warning is in italics clearly after the introduction. This is stuff for the experts. What more do you want?
For me, one of the saddest side-effects of modern generative AI is this apparent rise in an attitude of “I don’t know how to do this, therefore anyone who does this must have just one-shotted it with AI”.

Even if we assume this _could_ be one-shotted, projects like this from respected members of the retro hardware community would be what made that one-shot even possible.

As far as I can tell the person you are replying to has never posted anything of value or substance, maybe they should start using AI more
If this is the case, they should start using AI less.
He did a live stream of some of the reverse-engineering work https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2814615896