HN user
Flux will make sure to use components/vendors/distributors that are to your liking but right now you will still have to order them yourself
We are planning to directly integrate with fabs to place order/get quotes in the near future though
Founder here
Excited to share what we have been working on for the best couple years…think of it as Devin for PCB design
Let me know if you have any questions
Devin is light years ahead of Cursor. It’s not even the same category!
I stopped writing code by hand almost entirely and my output (measured in landed PRs) has been 10x
And when I write code myself then it’s gnarly stuff and I want AI to get out of my way…so I just use Webstorm
You are in luck
Flux.ai does that…have a look at this tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y56AqPOjp0k&t=366s
Flux Copilot will happily assist you going from an idea to selecting the right components all the way to manufactured board!
Flux founder here
Our mission is to take the “hard” out of hardware
We have 240k users on the platform…hobbyists, students, small/mid sized teams to Fortune50 companies. We host millions of projects!
It’s a huge ecosystem not just of users but also semiconductor manufacturers, fab houses, etc.
Think GitHub on steroids!
And it’s the only AI first end-to-end design tool in the market…you can go from idea to research to architecture to BOM to schematic to PCB layout and then to manufacturing. Workflows that usually take months in other tools can be done in a few hours to minutes in flux.
It’s still early days though but we are moving insanely fast! So if we don’t met your teams bar today I suggest checking back in next month.
I think it’s good for more players to enter the market…EDA tooling is stuck somewhere in the 80s and we need to fix that.
It’s too expensive and risky to make hardware…and we deserve better!
Silicon is the most important resource in the world, as evidenced by FAANG
FAANG’s ability to scale up compute is limited by their ability to design, test, and manufacture silicon. Every competitive AI company is working to build it’s own
Everyone is focused on making software layer more efficient, we are seeing 3-5x productivity gains
I am the founder of https://flux.ai and we are the only ones making the hardware layer more efficient, 6-15x productivity gains!
As you saw with NVIDIA’s growth, the hardware side of this is as valuable as the software side
Flux.ai is a AI first hardware design platform build for the modern age. Our mission is to take the “hard” out of hardware
LFG
Founder here
Happy to answer any questions you might have
Founder here
Hit me with your questions
The really cool thing that I forgot to mention here is that it makes the model composable
As you provide requirements and specs via properties to your project OR by adding components (which have their own properties) you are implicitly optimizing the model towards your use case (eg Analog Audio Aerospace applications)
These requirements/specs are all in human language…so an added benefit is that you provide more documentation for your human peers too!
How it works has been rapidly evolving
But in short: yes, thats how it works as of today! Our docs go into a bit more detail here.
But this space has been moving so fast that usually how it worked last week issn’t how it works this week.
You could easily imagine us leveraging fine tuned world models models on top of prompting in the near future.
Another thing to add is that we use a bunch of different models for our Copilot implementation…some popular off the shelf ones as well as some that we trained ourselves.
Objection your honor: Speculative!
Founder here
Thanks for the plug!
Happy to answer any questions
Yes we are working on integrating eCAD and mCAD into the same tool
It’s a long road ahead
Founder here…stoked to geek out with ya’ll here!
Yes you can!
Currently in production we only support pdfs
But support for html pages is in the pipeline as is support for multiple URLs per component/project
So you could provide a datasheet, application notes plus your own notes and Flux Copilot would take all that data into consideration
Founder here
A lot of you have been asking us how we ensure correctness of Copilots responses
Well here it is…citations!
Additionally you can provide your own custom data sources…so it’s not limited to datasheets but also works with application notes and anything else you might wanna provide
Hit us with questions
Shameless plug:
At https://flux.ai we are working on taking the “hard” out of hardware!
Also have a great slack based community with lots of hardware folks going
Our thinking has been the same
Give the LLM the ability to run the simulator and optimize the solution based on the outputs
Lots of amazing opportunities ahead
The list includes a bunch of hardware companies and teams that most/all would agree are the most sophisticated in the world
Hardware engineers get a bad rep for being stubborn when what they actual want is just good tools…and we believe they deserve them and so we are building them!
We have found engineers across the spectrum to find huge value
From the engineers that design the motherboard of the phone in your pocket to students and hobbyists
Use case go from learning/explanation to brainstorming, component research, figuring out the match for signal filters, to triaging of issues and so on.
Great question
It’s something we spend a lot of time thinking about. On one side we want to prevent hallucinations but on the other we want to keep the LLMs creativeness
We are experimenting with a bunch of different approaches here already
Preventing hallucinations and therefore improving correctness is fairly simple by providing the model with factual data sources which is something we are working on
The challenge is to balance that so that the model is also still creative when you want it to…but we are making progress here too
If you are interested ping us in our slack and we can add you to our beta tester channel to get access to our experiments in this space
Humblebrag: You’d be surprised how many of the most serious businesses have started to migrate to use Flux already!
Agree though that there is more to creating complex boards that automated wiring…we are not done here, just taking it step by step!
Fully agree!
It’s something we are working on among other things
Thanks for giving us a shot and the feedback!
We are still at day one here…lots of work ahead clearly!
On simulation: we have lots more to come here but work took a bit of a back burner as we have been focusing on PCB layout recently!
On AI: just getting our feed wet…but access to our docs is in the QA pipeline here and should hopefully land soon
Let me know if you wanna hop on a call…would love to learn more details about your usecases and how we can do better
Founder here:
Super excited to make another big step today to democratize electronics design!
Hit me with your questions
There is a great migration guide here from the flux team on how to onboard coming from Eagle
https://docs.flux.ai/Introduction/eagle-to-flux---migration-...
Yep, it’s fully integrated into Flux Copilot!
So beyond the automated impedance control during routing you can also get assistance on how to wire components correctly
Founder here: Hit me with your questions!
We knew that we had to build a foundation first to have any shot at getting AI right.
I worked at Meta for years and knew first hand that ML/AI can only ever get good with loooots of training data.
So we needed a way to produce lots of high quality training data first and a way for users to be able to reason about results and edit them.
There is a graveyard of failed AI hardware design projects and one thing they all have in common is that they are black boxes…its very obviously the wrong approach. But every week a new one pops up…I don’t even understand why anyone funds this stuff anymore frankly…it can’t work.
So we embarked on building our own eCAD editor first…that was gonna be step number one. It was also the hardest and most expensive way to go about it… but if you have big dreams then you just have to go and do big things. I recent these get rich quick schemes personally anyways…I love doing hard things!
LLMs just starting to get good around the time we had the editor ready for public launch (after years of beta) was a happy coincidence that makes us look like geniuses now. But I take it lol.
We had been actively playing on the side for the past 6 months on ideas for first AI features as we geared up for launch of the core editor but the critical insight to use our existing projects comments surface was a last minute brain fart that came to us about 6 weeks ago.
Things went pretty quick from there and we are moving extremely fast now that we have the right foundation.
Excited times!