Third pass at this layout with Opus 5.5. It did a lot better, but I specified a lot of considerations to get the placement to be more sane. I'm running into a few nitpicks here and there but looks like it would function way better.

Working on some of my Dad repair pile tonight. This leapfrog tag pen had a dead SMT fuse F1. Jumpered for now, will do a proper replace later. If I'm good I'll post a proper write up to my website for other dead pen owners.

An example on why AI PCB Layout (KiCAD/Opus 5.5/Freerouting) still sucks. Rather than directly connect crystal Y1, a 5V track interrupted, one side ran around it and the other went to IN.3 to jump across the 5V (a weirdly small jump that could've been gone around...) A junior engineer wouldn't even do this.

Pumped to upgrade my old saleae to this I just backed SLogic32U3 – The World's First 10Gbps USB3.2 Logic Analyzer on @kickstarter kickstarter.com/projects/sip…

It's still surprising how much of the physical volume of an sd card is just plastic

Does anyone have a KiCAD / AI workflow for PCB layout they actually like? Claude seems to work very slowly and usually the output has weird mistakes, like 1100mm of extra distance between nets and their testpoints, or vias blocking pins, or clustering all the components...

Alright, only 100 errors!

Ugh, I let Claude do some things in my KiCAD libraries and when I updated symbols from libraries I got all this fantastic junk.

Nerd flex

One thing that claude turned me on to that I likely never would've found with traditional search - @marimo_io as a tool for doing worst case circuit analysis. Pulls values from kicad analysis, automatically recalcs when I modify the python. Super cool.

I'm pretty happy with Opus 5 so far. This morning it resolved an unaligned hard fault that had been impossible for Sonnet 4 to figure out, and I was able to dump the supported PIDs for my Honda CRV!

The economy must be bad if the scammers think you might be interested in $8 jobs.

Dang.