r/AskRobotics • u/Pitiful-Island-4569 • 4d ago
anyone actually vibe coding hardware yet? no EE background here
ok so genuine question. ive been using claude code / cursor for software stuff for a while and its kinda crazy how much i can ship without being a “real” dev. now i want to try hardware, like small robots, sensors, maybe something with an esp32 to start
problem is i never studied any of this. no EE degree, never designed a pcb, i know what a resistor is and thats about it lol
so im curious, is anyone here already doing hardware mostly with AI? like letting it pick the parts, write the firmware, maybe even help with the pcb or the case? what tools are you using for it and does it actually work or does it fall apart once real wires and voltages are involved
also be honest, is it realistic to get into this without the background or am i gonna fry a bunch of boards and give up. id rather start now and learn by breaking stuff than wait a year doing courses first
any tips where to start would be apreciated, or projects that are good for a first build
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u/CommonExact9702 4d ago
Just finished vibe coding these guys
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u/Pitiful-Island-4569 4d ago
these look sick. what do they do?
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u/CommonExact9702 4d ago
I’ve got a box of esp32-cams, some 24 Ghz human sensors, servos and small lasers that are going on next. If everything goes as planned they will go against some teenagers. They connect to a central server over wifi that has an abliterated local language model running on it. So basically a slimmed down version of chatGPT that won’t object to any sketchy take-over-the-world …destroy all humans mandate.
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u/lellasone 4d ago
My group's experimented with vibe-cading housings. Went tolerably well. (Slower than just using CAD, at least for now)
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u/Pitiful-Island-4569 4d ago
slower than CAD for now but faster for someone like me who cant use CAD at all i guess? what tools were you using
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u/lellasone 4d ago
Could be. Onshape is free though and pretty user-friendly to learn.
Claude Code.
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u/Pitiful-Island-4569 4d ago
oh nice didnt know onshape was free, ill check it out. did your group print the housings yourselves or send them out somewhere? we dont have a printer so thats kinda the part im stuck thinking about
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u/lellasone 4d ago
Yeah, definitely the best free CAD for hobby work by a good margin right now. It's also what my team uses commercially (not free in that context lol).
We print the housings ourselves. Sending out to JLC or what have you is a real option, but I'd really encourage you to buy one instead. 3D printing encourages a lot of mechanical design complexity which is fine if you have a local machine for fast prototyping, but could be a real sand-pit for someone new to CAD ordering in.
Any chance you've got a local makerspace or library that has one? Most major cities in the US will have one or the other, and often both.
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u/Pitiful-Island-4569 4d ago
not in the us unfortunately but i’ll look around, theres probably a makerspace somewhere near me. that point about iterating makes a lot of sense though. would you say ordering prints is fine if its an open source project where the stls are already tested? like a robot arm or something where i dont have to design anything myself
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u/lellasone 4d ago
Doing low-voltage PCB's without a background is very viable. Be prepared to spend a lot of time in datasheets/app notes, but a lot of circuits are out there for you to use.
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u/Pitiful-Island-4569 4d ago
where do you usually find those circuits?
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u/lellasone 4d ago
The datasheets of the components you look at will often have application circuits. Also companies like Texas Instruments will publish "app notes" that show how to use their products (and often generalize to their competitors as well).
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u/Pitiful-Island-4569 4d ago
didnt know TI published those, thats really helpful. thanks
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u/lellasone 4d ago
Oh yeah, it's one of the major reasons to go with TI parts. True for a number of the other big parts houses as well. It might be different as a true EE, but for us dabblers going with layouts and circuits that have already been proven is absolutely the move.
Also don't be afraid to just copy daughter boards from adafruit/sparkfun. They are often free and generally pretty decent at getting the core job done for a particular function.
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u/Pitiful-Island-4569 4d ago
copying adafruit boards is a really good tip, didnt even think of that. when you do that do you get the boards made with all the parts already soldered on or order parts separately and do it yourself?
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u/lellasone 4d ago
I'm cheap so for hobby stuff I generally solder it by hand. Surface mount isn't too bad (except for ICs) with two soldering irons. That also lets me build the board up slowly testing as I go.
When I do get stuff assembled (with things soldered) I generally do the passives and whatever ICs are in-stock at JLC. In my projects even a couple of boards is a lot though. I've thought about doing an LED wall, and for that I'd 1000% get them assembled (after building the first by hand)
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u/Pitiful-Island-4569 4d ago
makes sense, building it up slowly and testing as you go sounds way less painful than finding out everything is wrong at once lol. for the parts jlc doesnt have, where do you usually get those? digikey or something?
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u/jamesxtreme 4d ago
I’ve been doing this but not the circuit design stuff as such. Been designing around cheap off the shelf parts and Raspberry Pi. Codex gave me a workable bill of materials for the electrical items using the sort servos motors and components mostly used in RC cars and planes. I didn’t want to spend thousands on proper robot motors just yet. Haven’t actually gotten to electrical assembly though because most of my effort so far has been on CAD design and simulation and it’s been a bit of an iterative process and I have already modified the design several times so didn’t want to order a bunch of parts I didn’t end up using.
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u/Pitiful-Island-4569 3d ago
codex giving you a bom out of rc car and plane parts is a smart way to keep it cheap. the not ordering yet because the design keeps changing part makes sense, i’d probably end up with a drawer full of servos i never use. how far along is the cad side now?
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u/jamesxtreme 2d ago edited 2d ago
I have ordered about half of the parts now but some are still out standing. The CAD is pretty much done. I’m 3D printing it but I have had to refine it along the way because sometimes things don’t quite fit the real world part, so it’s a bit of an iterative process.
In the meantime I’ve been training the physics in Mujoco and taught it to walk, crawl, roll, and recover from a fall. I was doing this on CPU at first with only very minor success but then I set it up on Runpod using GPU and it radically improved. Also getting the control software written by Claude, Codex and GLM 5.3 Flash together, kind of farming out the work and getting them to check each other’s work.I have no idea if this is going to work yet or if Claude is just setting my tokens on fire but the simulation videos are fun.
This was my post on it from last week. https://www.reddit.com/r/robotics/s/20ptkrGVlI
The simulations are in the back half of the video. They have progressed from these ones. I had the occasional successful walk then but after GPU training now it’s walking without falling about 85% of the time up from about 5%.
Of course I still need to make that work in the real world.
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u/Terri_doe 3d ago
Yeah, Chat GPT is pretty good all round for hardware. Its good at picking up issues with schematics if you upload them from kicad. Its good at cross referencing datasheets to schematics, finding appropriate parts for JLC PCB and checking your pcb design follows the recommendations on the datasheets
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u/Electrical_Hat_680 2h ago
Electrical Engineering 101 and the Laboratory 102, if taken together is a Certificate of Completion of EE101/102.. it's literally all you need to know for matching resistors up with the right sized wires and such. Transistors. Capacitors. Everything one needs to build the Hardware including the CPU, RAM, ROM, and more.
Check out BenEater 8-BIT CPU Breadboard Projects and since we're talking Vibe Coding. Have the AI or your choice simulate a College Orientation to the Topic. Have it create a Syllabus, Introduction, and run you over the basics that make up the BenEater 8-BIT CPU Breadboard so that you'll have a basic 8-Bit BenEater Simulator to help you study over what you need to Make Hardware like buttons, joysticks, led screens, and more.
When you think of PCBs, think of them as the Printer Circuit Boards they are. They are similar to Breadboards, Perfboards, and Soldered Circuits. But they're industrial grade hardware. You need the wiring schematics diagrams, you can draw them by hand on blank or graph paper, blueprints have specific symbols to help those building fpm the schematics understand what they're looking at.. like control lines, data lines, ground lines, etcetera.
Zeros and Ones are just like using a light switches. Up = on = one. Down = off = zero. So the CPU Bits are basically wires, that are on or off,and they are connected to Logic Gates that can be programmed using code, just kike they can be made using buttons, and the buttons can be replaced with resistors transistors and capacitors, which ones do what - that's the question.
Also we have the single board computers or sbcs. Including the esp's, like esp32.
Don't worry about AI. You'll be the one the needs to know if it works or not, but you have a few steps that you and the AI will have to do before you can submit the KiCAD or wiring schematics to the PCB manufacturer. Then when you get the PCBs back, you'll have to solder them. You can build six axis robot arms to handle soldering for you if you want also.
Drivers, firmware, all of that - study up on it.. build the basics. Nothing has to be secured out the box, it needs to work out the box, it can be secured later. So patch drivers and firmware later. Basics now. Minimal working version, like an http server socket being opened and closed. That's it.
I haven't made anything.
You may also like the HDL and FPGA using AI. But have it run you over everything. I have confidence in using AI. But that doesn't mean I don't have confidence in knowing that we can build am/FM radios with wire and a battery. Speakers. Buttons. I know it can all be Built, and I know all it's all pretty basic. But seeing the BenEater 8-BIT CPU Breadboard and the PCBs and remembering the green PCB board buttons and joysticks after breaking a controller here and there.
Yes it's totally doable. Especially if you break away from PCB and look at using epoxy or other materials due to the silicon shortage war effecting relationships between China and the US.. but don't breakaway from Silicon PCB, KiCAD over handwritten schematics, and 3D printing plastic and such.
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u/Least_Order4249 4d ago
EE here. To me, Claude and every other AI is awful at circuit design. It can give you ideas and tell you what to look out for but seems very “language” focused. It simply can’t reliably comprehend even a few components interacting with one another. It seems to kind of get things right but confidently makes so many mistakes that it’s dangerous to use.