> Very interested in your workflow - do you have anything online to share?

Not yet but once I'm ready it's all going to be open source.

> Also looked into automating altium more and found having to do a lot of GUI work to guide the models along.

Have you tried the Windows UI Automation/Accessibility APIs? You can download Accessibility Insights for Windows to see the data structure and it's well supported by Altium. It has everything you need to tell the LLM what's on screen without ever sending a screenshot (except for the 2d/3d CAD view) and the UIA provides an API that can actually click, focus, etc. without sending fake keyboard events manually. When reverse engineering the file format I put Opus on a loop and it just kept fiddling with the binary file format until Altium stopped throwing parsing errors.

> How much of going from ‘design in head’ to schematic and layout have you automated?

At this point everything but the final PCB routing. My autorouter and autoplacer are very much a work in progress and LLMs aren't great at routing complex traces, but they can brute force it given enough time and DRC checks. Right now I just shell out to autorouters like Specctra with a DSN and route the most important nets by hand in Altium. Since the LLM sets up all the design rules and can spend hours on a loop figuring out the optimal placement, it's usually a breeze. Especially compared to when I first started out in EE and spent days with part selection and footprint capture. Now a lot of that tedium is completely automated.

Soon I'll integrating probe-rs into the whole workflow and making end to end vibe PCBs, adding support for FPGAs, and integrating Solidworks so it does enclosures and molds too.

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hardware2415 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Very cool, definitely interested when you open source it! Great idea to use those apis, as not having the AI be able to check its own output was the big blocker. Is most of the work on the schematics therefore done through this, or manipulating the binaries themselves? Why Altium and not text based kicad for this? I presume just for the ‘professional features’ Altium has

	▲	akiselev 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Is most of the work on the schematics therefore done through this, or manipulating the binaries themselves? Why Altium and not text based kicad for this? I presume just for the ‘professional features’ Altium has I'm just manipulating the file format directly because I don't want to be tied to Windows (bleh). I only fire up Altium for a few features that I haven't implemented yet like the autorouting and the UI automation was to let the LLM figure out file corruption issues. I learned Altium long before KiCad was a viable option and Altium's ActiveRoute routing is the perfect blend between manual routing and autorouting so it's really hard to switch. ActiveRoute gets even better with the LLM filling out all the design rules.