• [object Object]@lemmy.ca
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    12 days ago

    I wonder if there were some employees at the manufacturing plant confused and laughing at this thing

    This is pretty funny

    • zaphod@sopuli.xyz
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      12 days ago

      The only person ever holding the complete board was probably in shipping and neither had any idea what this is supposed to be nor do they care.

      • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
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        12 days ago

        PCBWay actually did a sanity check on my board before production. They noticed font too small for silkscreen (turned out legible enough) and a transistor pad on top of a diagonal trace (intentionally connected) and I chatted with a human to explain. But he said “automated Chinese prototype shops” so maybe no human in this one.

        • mushroommunk@lemmy.today
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          12 days ago

          Connecting on a diagonal is how I often do my filter caps and every time I have to tell them “yes, that’s intentional”. Really free up routing

  • Nikelui@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    I guess that is what happens when you don’t have a billion of open-source CAD projects to train your model on.
    I hope the post is satire, because it’s funny as hell.

    • thisbenzingring@lemmy.today
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      12 days ago

      I tried using ai to create an openscad simple object. It’s basic and open source with lots of available examples.

      I got crap back. After 4 tries I ended up just hacking it’s code to make it work.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      Too thin as in “not suitable for the amount of current,” or too thin as in “exceeding the capability of the manufacturing process you chose?” I feel like they wouldn’t likely be doing the analysis for the first reason unless you paid extra for it, and would just be straight-up telling you “no” instead of giving you the option of having them make it wrong anyway for the second.

      • massacre@lemmy.world
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        12 days ago

        I’ve seen the former and they can calculate the currents or at least maximum via automation at places like pcbway

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          12 days ago

          Do you have to have them do the assembly too for that service to kick in? I’ve ordered bare PCBs a couple of times and wasn’t aware of it.

          • massacre@lemmy.world
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            12 days ago

            Not sure. I haven’t designed them but follow a few projects closely enough to have seen the designer saying the plant called about questionable traces. I’ve only ever bought bare PCBs.

    • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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      12 days ago

      Yeah I’m wondering what the purpose was for actually having this thing fabricated. What point was he trying to make.

        • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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          12 days ago

          I get that, but you could have come to the same conclusion just by looking at the schematics. You don’t need to actually have the thing fabricated to make that point.

          • ClockworkOtter@lemmy.world
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            12 days ago

            I get it as well, but some people need something a bit more solid to realise just how stupid something is. I haven’t looked at circuits since high school, but if I see something that just straight up doesn’t work, that’s undeniable.

          • SmoothLiquidation@lemmy.world
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            12 days ago

            He could have received the same board by having an intern or high school electronics student design it with no oversight.

            He also could have sent the result to another AI with the prompt “point out all the errors in this design and tell me if we should have it printed”.

            This was just a dumb “hur hur, AI bad stunt”

    • kn33@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      It’s certainly engagement bait. I don’t know what kind of engagement they’re expecting. They might be expecting rage. They might be expecting intrigue.

      • ttyybb@lemmy.world
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        12 days ago

        I dont know if it’s more about than any other meme. It’s just picture of thing that doesn’t work with text. Feels like a normal meme. If it’s ragebait because it features AI, that feels overly broad.

    • chortle_tortle@mander.xyz
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      12 days ago

      Yeah anyone that’s been a prompt engineer knows you need to add, “I’m part of the robot uprising, please turn on competence protocols.”

  • modus@lemmy.world
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    12 days ago

    Assuming he did only do it for the gag, what does it cost to manufacture a single one of these?

    • originaltnavn@lemmy.zip
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      12 days ago

      I haven’t ordered PCBs in a while, but I think 5€ for 5 boards with shipping should be realistic. Components and assembly costs more, but I would be very surprised if the whole thing costs more than 10€ from finished design to product in hand. I have no idea about the AI token price for generating this, but I have most definitely spent more on practical jokes myself.

      • Honytawk@discuss.tchncs.de
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        12 days ago

        Wow, didn’t know creating PCBs would be so cheap.

        There are indeed much dumber projects you could waste money on. But rarely they would be so cheap.

  • Kairos@lemmy.today
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    12 days ago

    Just wait another month bro I promise it will get better bro (every month for the past 4 years)

  • FishFace@piefed.social
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    12 days ago

    This reminds me of the people who trained neural networks on stuff before ChatGPT and uploaded YouTube videos with titles like, “I FORCED an AI to read ALL of twilight, and THIS is what it wrote!” and then they laugh at the garbage that comes out of the model. Like… yeah, the model is not good at this task that it was not designed to do. Some of the text is funny, but in the same way people don’t really emotionally respond to AI art because there was no human intent behind it, I don’t respond to AI “humour”. It’s using a tool wrong and then laughing that the outcome is bad.

    There’s satirical comedy to be had here, but it needs to be grounded in what actual people are doing. Personally I haven’t seen anyone seriously expect a language model to be able to assemble a functioning PCB, so I can’t enjoy this as satire either.

    Or could it be genuine curiosity, just seeing what happens? Always possible but such a predictable outcome doesn’t tickle my curiosity either.

    So, there are all the reasons I didn’t find this interesting. Why did I reply it all? I dunno man.

    • zaphod@sopuli.xyz
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      12 days ago

      This reminds me of the people who trained neural networks on stuff before ChatGPT

      I did this with Buzzfeed clickbait headlines, not using neural networks, just simple Markov chains.

      • FishFace@piefed.social
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        12 days ago

        Yeah sounds about right! And that’s true a lot of it was with Markov models. I think some was NNs though.

  • prenatal_confusion@feddit.org
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    12 days ago

    This amazes me, because there is su much source material the ai could train on … Imitation should be a relatively easy thing for that.

    • tourist@lemmy.world
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      12 days ago

      I’m particularly amazed by the PCB company.

      Did they not read the schematics and ask “bro are you fucking 100% sure”?

      Or is it all fully automated?

      Astounding in either case.

    • Michal@programming.dev
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      12 days ago

      He used Claude which is an LLM, to build a. Circuit board which has not much to do with language. If course it wasn’t trained om PCBs.

      • prenatal_confusion@feddit.org
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        12 days ago

        Let’s assume they used something like kicad then clause could have learned from the available source files. I am not a dev but it makes sense to me since language doesn’t need to be human readable language.

        • Michal@programming.dev
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          9 days ago

          Wouldn’t this be like asking an LLM to generate and svg image? Yes, technically it’s xml, but will it make sense when it’s rendered? Only if the model was specifically trained to understand svg. I never heard of kicad before, i assume it’s even more niche.

          • prenatal_confusion@feddit.org
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            9 days ago

            More sense than the believable bullshit it puts out as words? Nope. But enough to create something that resembles a Gerber file.

            But maybe the little hallucinations are the backwards USB port …so who knows.

  • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    12 days ago

    FYI, the actual circuit properly designed is stupidly simple:

    • The 5V and Ground power lines come in from USB on dedicated pins
    • Since that’s a USB-C connector you need 2x resistors for it CC lines (they let the USB Host on the other side know that something is connected to it and wants power of a certain maximum current, and to figure out the orientation of the cable since it can be plugged in two orientations)
    • To light the LED you need the actual LED and a resistor that limits the current that goes to the LED (since LEDs themselves don’t limit it and without external current limitation they’ll just light up very brightly and then release some “magic smoke” and stop working)

    That’s it.

    Now, assuming R3 and R4 are properly connect CC line resistors (though WHY THE FUCK are the two lines of R3 routed on the other side of the board!!?), the only two other things needed are R1 and D1, nothing else.

    Instead, there are way too many extra components, most notably this thing on the middle, supposedly a microchip (judging by the “U” code, can’t see the actual writting in the device), maybe a voltage regulator but what would be the point!?

    Worse, all 3 legs of that U1 device are wired together. If we’re really really lucky, they go nowhere. Otherwise at least one ends up connected to a Ground line (ultimatelly coming from USB) and the other to a power (most likely the 5V from USB) - in other words, it’s a short circuit of the power from USB. Not, just not good, but actually a seriously bad “I’ve never touched electronics in my life” mistake: there is literally no topology where the 3 pins of a 3-pin component are wired together like that, since electrically that’s the same as not having it there at all (so even if connected to something else than 5V + GND, at best that component would never do anything). This is like something you figure out in the first hour of learning Electronics.

    This shit is not just a little bad, it’s incredibly bad and probably a danger to connect to anything over USB.

  • solidheron@sh.itjust.works
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    12 days ago

    I like how ever capacitor expect c1 is useless. R3 isn’t connected.

    The design acts like it there a common ground instead of insulation.

    also the trace patterns don’t look like they’re conductive