alt Hacker NewsI’m working on my own PCB and it’s my first time working on a hardware project.
Any tips on how or where I could get my design reviewed?
Replies
connorlu • last Sunday at 3:15 PM
If you're building with KiCad then I've found the folks on the KiCad discord[1] very willing to take a look over a design and provide feedback. There's also a subreddit[2] for PCB design posting and review, but I haven't personally used it.
[1] https://www.kicad.org/community/chat/ [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/PrintedCircuitBoard/
I'm usually not an Ai shill, but I found Fable to be the first LLM that could actually provide useful feedback on a KiCAD PCB design. I paired it with a KiCAD MCP, but it tended to reverting to raw KiCAD scripting. If you ask it to review a PCB design, and provide feedback relevant to PCB design best practices, it will probably give you something useful. I wouldn't trust it to do a full design, but it's pretty good at finding issues. I'd add a few clauses to the request regarding checking components against JLCPCB/PCBWay/etc available components, as well as checking copper layer thickness and distances from the main components to the supporting components.
I did this as an experiment on my current project and it found a bunch of minor, non-critical, but completely valid problems with my deisgn.