AI PCB Design

[Tre-Cool]

So I'm sure a few of you have seen some of the AI PCB video & chatter going on lately & ironically I guess i was slightly ahead of the curve before all this hit the facebook feeds because as part of my CAN display project ive been working on I needed to make some expansion boards to connect up to the existing Riverdi display's i have for additional IO features & OTA capability.

I'll start by saying I have zero experience/knowledge on how to do any circuit hardware design nor software programming skills. If it ain't GUI driven or WYSIWYG, then I lose interest real quick.

However I've had idea's in my head on cool shit i'd like to have made for years, but being niche products or low volume sales potential, it's never been worth pursuing. So with a abundance of time & money to potentially burn & having lots of success on the programming code side of things I thought i'd give Claude the job of making me some PCB boards.

Software wise I'm using Claude Desktop, Kicad 10.0, OpenScad.

Project 1:
First board to get made was what i call the "Mini Expander Board".

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## What the board does

A daughterboard for a Riverdi 7″ STM32H7 display, plugging onto the **P8** header and the **RiBUS** FFC.
it adds an **8-channel 16-bit ADC** for vehicle analog inputs and dry contacts, a **copper-only vehicle-CAN pass-through**, and keeps the ESP32-C3 WiFi module (on SPI1 over RiBUS) with native USB-C flashing. Powered from the car's 12 V via the display.

It was effectively a test case to add an ESP32 device & analog break out signals by plugging into the Riverdi's 40 pin, 1.27mm expansion header & breaking them out to 2.5mm pins along with using a 20 pin FFC, both ports provide SPI interfaces to relevant sub modules & work as a pass through of power & can signals via molex connector to the displays original Picoblade connectors (tiny bastards!).

JLCPCB was used to manufacture all the boards & there was luckily a failed attempt on the first job i sent to get manufactured that Tazzi picked up immediatly, so i managed to cancel the order to address the issue on the next round. It was a few weeks ago now & i can't remember what the specific issue was but it would of cost me $400 worth of failed parts.

Cue some 3 weeks later after getting the board made, delivered & me getting home from work, i was looking forward to testing out my new board.. cue suspenseful music..

So i start by plugging it into my laptop usb port to attempt to load the esp32 firmware up & nothing.. no comm port, no sound of a usb connected device.. ah shit. ah well try the next one... same, then the next.. all 5 boards have the same problem. completely dead, this is not good. Spent the day talking to claude on testing points, checking voltages, resistance, continuity & nada. I end up removing the ESP32 chip on 1 board looking for a short or issue before i set them aside in disappointment.

Cost of Boards: $397.20
Result & known issues: Dead, no power
FFC pinout is ass about to what the display uses, so it needs an A type FFC & flip the cable over. Basically Pin 1 on a normal FFC connector is on the left, but Riverdi made pin 1 on the right of the board.
I also purchased some premade 6 pin pico blade cables, these should have been pinned 1:1, but i found pin 1 goes to 6,2 to 5 & so on. Not good when mixing 12v & gnd for the power pass-through.

Luckily i had the smarts to check this before i plugged it in, but the display does have reverse voltage protection, but not keen to pop a display board either.

Next board i ordered was the "Track Expander Board".

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Again another board for the Riverdi display, this is the cheapest expansion boards im going to offer for sale with my displays. The displays themselves can be used in pretty much anything, not user configurable to the max like a powertune or haltech, but it doesn't take a week to boot up. Since it's firmware based & not running a linux kernel it's basically ready to go in under 2 seconds from power on.
back to the board:

## What the board does
*The motorsport tier: a **brainless, display-driven** daughterboard for the Commander 7 display (Riverdi H7 module, mated over the P8 hub). It gives the display **8 channels of protected 16-bit analog input**
(any of which can be a **dry-contact switch input**), **4 protected high-side outputs**, an **ESP32-C3 for WiFi/BLE**, a **GPS/BDS receiver**, and **CAN pass-through** — all from a single 12 V vehicle feed,
reverse- and surge-protected. There is **no local MCU**: the display's H7 drives the ADC and outputs directly over the P8 hub, and the ESP over the RiBUS flex.

Cost of Boards: $505.58
Problems:
Same deal as the Mini board, plug it into my laptop to flash the firmware & were dead too. FARKKK.... spend another day talking to claude on what the issue could be, 2 different style board with the same problem, this is clearly not a board build issue, but a placement one.. End result find that 3 of the power diodes were placed back to front. Claude had assigned the wrong pin numbers to components & since the track board was based off the mini, it carried over the same fault. So from the learnings on this one i was able to recover the mini boards by unsoldering the diodes, rotating them 180, solder again & the sweet sound of a device detected on the USB port started chiming away.

GPS works, comms to ESP works, Analog signal inputs also worked to a Display Project ive configured for our Haltech fitted budget race car. Large feeling of relief that i haven't blown close to $1000 bucks for zero results.

Next board is a Dual PWM fuel pump controller V1 (i'm at like V3.1 design now, coz i keep adding features, lol).

It has ESP32, can twai. PWM 2 x 30amp TI/Walbro 525 pumps or fans, 3rd output control for reverse lights or relay. Basically you can configure it to turn on the output based on any canbus signal condition.
Watch CAN data gauges over the wifi link on laptop/phone (i even built a custom firmware to a cheap 7" waveshare dash to configure the device/access the gauges etc)

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Cost of Boards: $525.58
Problems: Plugged it into program the esp & luckily when i was holding it i felt something get hot with my finger real quick, disconnected it before the smoke got let out, whether that would happen or not im not sure, but i erred of the side of caution & unplugged it. Again spent some more time diagnosing with claude, during some voltage checks found that the 3.3v supply to the esp was being pulled down to 1.4v. Again the cause of this was a pinout issue to a component, luckily it was auxillary signal over voltage protection related for ESP ADC pins, but was redundant because we were already clamping via TVS clamps. So easy solution was to just de-solder the 3 components off each board.

I've also been getting claude to do a bunch of 3d design work so i could print out case mounts & other parts/projects im working on too. I feed it measurements, suggestions etc & it gets it right 70% of the time, but it's still quicker then me learning the CAD software. I have however gotten more confidence/knowledge on circuit design, running trace lines, via's etc on the PCB side. Sometimes it's quick for me to do stuff then let claude attempt to do it headless, purely because of software limitations.

Over all, It's pretty exciting stuff. The display boards will just be used for development use & the current issues have already been rectified for new board orders with some other placement tweaks etc.

[antus]

Really cool post, thanks for shareing. I have started looking in to this, I tried that flux.ai app that is being spammed, but it chewed through a demo and through the first payment and had nothing to show for it. Further it seemed to refresh the session and loose the details of what it was building and was starting to build some completely different and useless project for me, before I pulled the plug on it an cancelled my account.

So then I tried Altium designer with this MCP and the project in VSCode with Claude. https://github.com/salitronic/eda-agent
I gave Claude a list of existing MCP servers for Altium, and it decided this one was the go as it had the strongest API.

That was much more successful. There were crashes in the Altium scripting engine, Claude created a skill as it went and it found the issues and created ways to work. Every so often it had trouble and used a python plugin to screenshot the app to take a look at what had happened to use that to keep going. Ultimately, it was successful, though I havn't tried to physically build the project yet. So I don't know what I don't know about quality of the output. What I do know is that the project is passing the design rules check, and at least in theory all required technical standards were followed and the design meets the physical and electrical criteria.

After seeing your post I might switch to KiCad next time. Altium is powerful, but probably too heavy and overkill for the scale I am working on, and its old fashioned - delphiscript API for the MCP server might be a bit trash compared to other options.

[Tre-Cool]

Yeah i also gve that flux-ai thing a go too. was useless. i couldnt even get it to import that mini board before it ran out free credits.

also annoyed me that you needed to give CC before you can trial it. I cancelled it within an hr to make sure they didnt try and charge me.

[Muncie]

I used Ai for interface board in my onerom to vx-vy project (thanks jxx for the idea) i literally explained what i want and it spat me out a ZIP file i opened in Kicad expecting garbage but ultimately it looked logical.

Ive never used kicad or any cad software ive looked at it but not created anything.

These boards just shuffle pins from one thing to another so no hardware but are multi layer no components i sent to PCBWAY they bounced the design back twice ultimately nothing electrical but silkscreen was wrong so just got thade without, and they work.

This was using a paid Chat GPT account in just personal mode not work mode. Work mode costs extra but gets shit done quick! personal gets there a but slower doesnt cost anything over your monthly fee.

[antus]

Here is where I got to with altium. That C19 is a bit 'how ya going? but in theory its a can+vpw interface that I would like to make.

[Staggie]

Here is a PSU that I have been working on, 4 layer board that I though I would give Chat GPT Pro a go on in work mode using licensed version of DipTrace, some of its routing was a bit questionable but component placement seems to tick all the boxes and was logical. GPT-6 Astra has improved a hell of a lot since last time I attempted , just getting to do a rough in is a major time saver even if just setting net classes, component layout etc.

Screenshot 2026-09-15 204324.png

[Tre-Cool]

Here is where I got to with altium. That C19 is a bit 'how ya going? but in theory its a can+vpw interface that I would like to make.

Doing a VPW to CAN gateway was on my to do list, but low priority. Good to know others are also working on something.

I would like to do a plug n play VZ pim replacement, add wifi & other features etc.

Something else im gonna send off soon is a 5V sensor hub, once i finalize cnc case design (buying a desktop 5 axis/cnc machine is now on my shit i need to buy list).

Reason for it?, an issue the Haltech/Link ecu's have is they share a 5v power wire for the sensors, so if you get a bad sensor that pulls it to gnd, you are dead in the water, especially if you have DBW or 5v crank/cam sensors like gen 4/5 GM stuff.

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This will have status lights for each 5v & mounts each signal,gnd,sensor 5v via a 3 pin DTM connector & now that i think of it, it maybe worth adding a couple of 6 pin versions for Throttlebody & Pedal connectors.

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[MPC001]

Awesome stuff . Thank you for sharing all.