Interesting. Not clear what it really does. The hardware is an oscilloscope probe on a 3-axis CNC mechanism. That's called a "flying probe", and you can buy one.[1]

Fine. But what does the AI do? It "ingests the project", but what does that mean? Finding all the pins? That's a start. Using a SPICE model to figure out what should be on each pin, and checking? Now that would be impressive. Probably something in between.

The usual use for this sort of thing is that you probe a known-good board to find out what voltages and signals appear where, and then compare with newly manufactured boards. That's a common production check.

There's potential here. If the AI has some concept of what the board under test is doing, and can diagnose problems, that's quite useful.

[1] https://huntron.com/products/access2.htm

I think the novel idea is you jam some hardware together (whatever you like) that can do "physical real world" things with a well understood interface and then spin up Claude with access to it.

The way I'm thinking about it is, it's a _workflow_ innovation?

So you ask for data sheets for all the visible chips and get PDFs in an output directory with zero user interaction except to flip the board, ask for a basic idea of connectivity, get a stitched high res surface image etc.... which of course are all currently possible, but you can do them potentially with very low effort. There doesn't have to be a _software stack_ ahead of time. You ask Claude to do the thing, it will figure out how to do it, write some code, pull in some OSS and make the thing happen. You can take this project's software or leave it.

You might say "tell me where you think the JTAG headers are" and it will come up with a workflow to do its best at that task (most likely with variable results...), but this is not a thing you can do with any commercial product I am aware of today. With probes, stuff might get interesting.

Of course experienced hardware & reverse engineers already can do all this stuff and have workflows for it but I still think it's an interesting POC of a generalisable approach. You can take or leave this guy's software stack. Also, the hardware barely matters, you can duct tape whatever to whatever.

From my understanding is you’d probe the board during different operations, process the results and deduct what signals are useful and traffic transmitting across the board (I.E private keys, what protocols are used, debug interfaces, firmware components, chip functions, etc).