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abraaeyesterday at 7:02 PM1 replyview on HN

If I understand what you are doing this sounds like a great idea.

For example a part like the ADS7953 ADC comes with layout recommendations, including the design of the ground plane underneath the chip and the placement of the decoupling caps. A more extreme example would be an esp32 and all of it's supporting parts, including the keepout area on the PCB for wifi transmission.

I really want to assemble circuits out of higher level primitives like that, drag and drop a chip and all of its supporting parts, including their layout and power connections.


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mikeaylesyesterday at 8:05 PM

So this isn't exactly putting pre-wired up blocks together, my intent behind phaestus is to essentially to get you from an idea to a prototype tangible product as fast as possible.

I'm targeting sub 5mins from first prompt to manufacturing exports, stl files for enclosure, gerbers for pcb manuf, bin file for firmware, bom for pcba.

E.g. if you wanted something that doesn't exist, but don't have the time, the skills or it's just not worth it. One silly example I had was a colour e-ink selfie fridge magnet. As far as I know, that doesn't exist, I could make it, but I can't be arsed. (so I could suprise my partner with a selfie, a picture of our dog, or anything, just a little treat for her for putting up with me).

With this, it'll pull in a ESP32-S3 Sense Xiao board, an e-ink module, a battery connector and a usb c charge connector. glue it all together, and there we go.

Should work if you wanted a rudimentary zigbee mesh communicator, pulls in a C6, a touchscreen, battery, probably a physical button or two. Once that block library starts filling up, it'll become more and more capable.

However, what I suspect you're after is more aligned with https://www.circuitsnips.com

I built circuitsnips to be the 'thingiverse' for electronics schematics.

Unfortunately it's been a bit neglected since so much of my free time has gone into phaestus, I did have great intentions to kicad up some official reference designs, so I can get rid of the github scraped bootstrap data as that was the sticky point both ethically and for the quality of the schematics, but there are only so many hours in a day.

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