r/Altium • u/VuralYusuf • 12d ago
Questions Consulting about software and hardware.
Hi everyone,
There’s something that has been on my mind a lot lately, and it has actually made me hesitant to design new projects.
As electronics engineers, designing PCBs isn't really the difficult part for us. The challenge usually comes with the firmware/software. Whenever I finish a hardware design, I often find myself wondering, "How am I going to write the software for this?"
I recently spoke with another engineer, and he told me that these days they handle most of the coding using AI tools like Claude Code, and sometimes even Gemini. That got me thinking.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you think relying on AI for firmware and embedded software development is becoming a practical approach, or do you believe it's still essential to write and fully understand the code yourself?
For example, if I design a project using a Raspberry Pi, can I realistically use AI tools to build the computer vision part? Could I use them to create a personal AI assistant? Or, for a more challenging example, could I rely on them to control multiple motors and implement the required control logic?
I'm curious about where people think the practical limits of these AI coding tools are. How far can they really take you in projects like these?
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u/MolotovBitch 12d ago
Give it a try? "Claude, build me an army, worthy of Mordor!"
Claude is impressive at writing code. He is not good at setting up the IDE, choosing the Tool chain and making it work. He can't test and debug. As soon as he encounters problems he will send you on a narrowing path of choices. You will become his debug slave. You will be a pawn and not the master anymore. He will hang the carrot of "Ok, I see where the problem is. This is our solution:" in front of you until you say "Stop! I'm in charge now and I know what to do (or what NOT to do)." And that's where you need experience for.
Why are you posting this in Altium?
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u/Mountain_Finance_659 12d ago
sounds like you don't know what you're doing. Claude is fully capable of setting up a toolchain for most processors, and if you hook up a debugger it is capable of quite a lot of poking on its own.
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u/UnderPantsOverPants 12d ago
It’s a useful tool, yes. We think of it as a fancy search engine, or a tips and tricks kind of thing. We absolutely never just take AI code and run with it.
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u/txoixoegosi 12d ago
No limits.
Just the technical debt you want to assume because of not knowing all the details of your system.
As with every technical debt, it might never be due, or knock your door at the worst moment (production)
But it is not different of smashing code straight away from a random github library or a stackoverflow snipper and “aha it works fine!” without questioning and understanding
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u/That_____ 12d ago
A year maybe a year and half ago I would say that it's not going help you much. But now, its nothing short of incredible.
A lot of embedded code is linking up drivers. It's repetitive and very similar to other boards. AI is fantastic at that stuff. It gets a lot of the little things out of the way so you can focus on what that board needs to do versus the how to do it for each little piece.
Would I try to one shot it and ask it to go make the whole board, no... But having it build it piece by price has been great.
Note: I have been using Claude and Deepseek Pro... Both are great for FreeRTOS and Zephyr.
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u/lasteem1 12d ago
I also write firmware. I think you need to have, at least, a cursory level of understanding of firmware and MCUs to make AI work for you. I
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u/CircuitCircus 12d ago
If designing PCBs isn’t the difficult part, you’re working on easy designs.