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nullc: Maybe put the probe on a spring loaded linear sensor, and move down until it hits a target offset (could just be read by a simple flag in an optical sensor)-- resulting in hitting a constant target force.

deanputney: Wow that's nuts. What a great idea! I wonder how much of this the commercial flying probe machines can do already. Pretty cool to be able to have this on a home scale.

Havoc: Can't say I fully understand it but this certainly smells like someone is getting hired off a single github repo as CV

ghurtado: Nowadays the former seems to be a requirement for the latter, so I'm inclined to agree with you

esbranson: > digitally guided fabrication> New York[1][1] https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/keeping-new-yorkers-safe-go...

uSoldering: It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting this to be real more than I do, but this is nowhere close to being ready to do actual work. Photographing real PCBs is hard, there is no fiducial maths, no actual probing is being done. It's just photos of a photo being piped into an agent. If it actually did what it claims, no reasonable person would exclude it from the demo video.https://gainsec.com/2026/04/16/autoprober/

vatsachak: Same guy who made the Flock hacking tool

odie5533: Guy builds car from stick of gum, paperclip, and an old vehicle

DaiPlusPlus: > someone is getting hired off a single github repo as CVIsn't that a good thing?

callumprentice: I figured this was some kind of home-grown prosthetic arm whose wearer could, using AI, draw any artwork online, speak ASL, perform minor surgery on themselves and so much more so long as their supply of tokens lasted.Perhaps a smidge disappointed when I had a look and discovered it wasn't that :)

Animats: Interesting. Not clear what it really does. The hardware is an oscilloscope probe on a 3-axis CNC mechanism. That's called a "flying probe", and you can buy one.[1]Fine. But what does the AI do? It "ingests the project", but what does that mean? Finding all the pins? That's a start. Using a SPICE model to figure out what should be on each pin, and checking? Now that would be impressive. Probably something in between.The usual use for this sort of thing is that you probe a known-good board to find out what voltages and signals appear where, and then compare with newly manufactured boards. That's a common production check.There's potential here. If the AI has some concept of what the board under test is doing, and can diagnose problems, that's quite useful.[1] https://huntron.com/products/access2.htm

apimade: From my understanding is you’d probe the board during different operations, process the results and deduct what signals are useful and traffic transmitting across the board (I.E private keys, what protocols are used, debug interfaces, firmware components, chip functions, etc).

xyzzy123: I think the novel idea is you jam some hardware together (whatever you like) that can do "physical real world" things with a well understood interface and then spin up Claude with access to it.The way I'm thinking about it is, it's a _workflow_ innovation?So you ask for data sheets for all the visible chips and get PDFs in an output directory with zero user interaction except to flip the board, ask for a basic idea of connectivity, get a stitched high res surface image etc.... which of course are all trivial things to do, but you can do them with very low effort. There's no _software stack_ ahead of time. You ask Claude to do the thing, it will figure out how to do it, write some code and make the thing happen.You might say "tell me where you think the JTAG headers are" and it will come up with a workflow to do its best at that task (most likely with variable results...), but this is not a thing you can do with any commercial product I am aware of today. With probes, stuff might get interesting.Of course experienced hardware & reverse engineers already can do all this stuff and have workflows for it but I still think it's an interesting POC of a generalisable approach. You can take or leave this guy's software stack. Also, the hardware barely matters, you can duct tape whatever to whatever.

maininformer: Could an agent no develop a bespoke correction algorithm for the photos of the photo?

claytonia: Cool demo, but letting an AI Agent drive a physical probe may have problems. AI is probabilistic, but hardware is precise. If the model miscalculates a pin's position by even 0.1mm, the probe may crush the board. I am curious how the author actually bridges the gap between the Agent’s 'guess' and the sub-millimeter precision needed to avoid damaging hardware?

numpad0: [delayed]

par1970: I think this is roughly solved. Tell the agent to do all of its calculations in python.

contingencies: I believe the standard production check is more like you check continuity between known nets, given that you're the manufacturer, you already know where they are exposed, and therefore you can perform those checks before adding any components. Post component checks are a lot more complicated because active components and passive components will modify the visible voltages and characteristics, often to the point where you won't have the same degree of physical insight.I would assume once machines are set up that this is only really done if you're not confident of your manufacturing line for some reason (eg. maintenance, reconfiguration) or you are pushing limits somewhere, for example, particularly small vias or traces very close to the edge of the board.To make this useful, you would want two flying probes because otherwise it's not going to be telling you much you don't already know.

uSoldering: Why feed it photos of a photo when you could just feed it the photo that was printed out?

NegativeLatency: Would be cool if you could use this (with 2 probes) to build a wiring net for reverse engineering.

contingencies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGyver

Animats: It's lower level than that. "It will probe the approved targets and report back." It has enough smarts to find the pins, and maybe it can read the text labels on some ICs, but that's about it. That eliminates much drudgery, though. And probably the job of some tech who did that by hand.

shevy-java: I watched the linked in video:https://videos.files.wordpress.com/gD3kAWlO/autoprober-demo....But I am not sure what do I see there? Is that some 3D printing?

gbgarbeb: Kathy Hochul is cracking down on illegal flying probe machines.

kuizu: A similar concept, but with multiple probes at the same time, was published in this blog series as open source hard- and software: https://www.schutzwerk.com/en/blog/proboter-01/ They explain some of the use cases in this demo video https://youtu.be/TYEjZA-xbGo?is=osWXCrBkLOi4JHxO

Animats: That's a blank board test. This is straightforward given the netlist and Gerber files.[1] It's just a continuity check between known points. Does not require AI.[1] https://bayareacircuits.com/bare-printed-circuit-board-elect...

contingencies: Yes, manufacturing defined products, at least using known methods, does not require AI.Although, that doesn't stop people raising while pretending it does!

_flux: What does it do with a single probe, though? You need two to actually probe anything, right?So I'm wondering how is the second probe problem dealth with. I've considered something similar but with small weight attached to a pogo pin, so the CNC arm could then just move it around, which would not be very easy to get completely reliable as there may be components on the board.

s_m_t: Your common oscilloscope is common ground referenced. You attach to your test circuits ground with the typically black alligator clips coming off the probe and then read voltage at a point with the test lead. A decent differential probe like you might be thinking of usually costs about as much as a decent hobbyist oscilloscope.

_flux: Ah well that does simplify things significantly, I suppose it's probably still somewhat useful.But I'd expect a big part of the nets are not connected to the ground? I mean in my hobby designs a majority of them is, but let's say if you generously use decoupling capacitors, then that might not be the case?

lrvick: This looks super useful, but I wish authors could stop doing these silly "source available" plays.Instead of donating to a project one has to buy GPU time to convert it to FOSS.

jstanley: A spring-loaded probe would seem sufficient.

Jamesbeam: Finally i don’t need to press any buttons on my bionic arm any longer, the AI can find the pin on its own.What a glorious time to be alive.Claude really is going to bring pleasure to the people.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgtO5sebA9U

weitendorf: About a dozen times a month I have an AI agent drive me to work.IMO this is basically an excuse to build a robotics self-eval loop, which only just became possible at this scale (Waymo spent billions of dollars and thousands of person-years on their driver). I have a similar project for programming a consumer-grade robotic hand and drone/rc cars.

stefan_: But there is no good reason you can't do that already. Hardware engineers have just been fundamentally unserious about computer use going on 20 years. The PCB design you could do in 2000 already, but now it's still PDF datasheets, people drawing footprints and connecting RX lines to RX lines.

micromacrofoot: why not just take a photo with your phone and upload that to the llm