For reasonably complex boards, it’s often not possible to know if it’ll work as intended until you have an assembled prototype in hand… even if you have the best SPICE and RF simulations ever, data sheets for many components can be missing important details, or components can have errata.

LLMs may be able to accelerate time to first prototype, but I don’t think it’ll be possible for them to revolutionise electronics design in the same way that’s happened for software - there’s not enough data, and it’s not cheap to gather more.

That sounds a great deal like what AI has done for software. Today in software, the work has gone from coming up with approaches and initial attempts to verification and making sure that what AI decided to do is fit for purpose.

The amount of skill needed has gone down dramatically.

The skill floor has gone down dramatically, but the skill ceiling is still quite high depending on the domain.

I'm not sure how true that is. When Claude made progress on the Riemann conjecture, here are the kind of prompts used:

> Jarred's input was mostly limited to sending Claude messages of encouragement (mostly variants of “keep going” or “believe in yourself”).2 This seems to have helped Claude overcome some initial skepticism that it could make meaningful progress.

It seems like the kind of prompts a high schooler could come up with. What kind of problems were you thinking of as high skill?

https://www.anthropic.com/research/riemann-zeta

The full transcript is here: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/8a0d1add3c637b858a9a181e98c40e...

I think we'll may see something like:

1.AI design tool

And in the warehouse of a big electronics distributor: 1.something like 3D printing that can make a single board rapidly 2.An automated assembly for a single board 3.AI based Automated testing for prototypes, with remote access.

This may reduce the loop to under a day.

Finally, a new development in lyric transcription! I’ve been waiting to see this for ages!

def get_lyrics(waveform, sr, cfg): # asr and wav2vec2 raise NotImplementedError()

I’ve thought about building something similar, but for an arbitrary number of sound sources, with a single flying fader, a small mono display for icons, and some buttons.

…hang on a minute, it already (kind of) exists: https://www.elgato.com/us/en/p/stream-deck-plus-black

Maybe I'm blind, but what you linked doesn't seem to have any faders, and instead have four knobs?

Everything already exists, which is no excuse for doing it again.

Also check some of the forks of Deej; some already implement this in a DIY form

I've been thinking about building a tiny, (relatively) cheap haptic knob. I wonder if this makes enough torque for it to feel right? Maybe with a big stator and a small knob.

I remember watching this youtube video a while ago:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip641WmY4pA (quick demo)

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q76dMggUH1M (building)

You can use a small BLDC motor as the knob, shaft and bearing.