Startseite
Podcasts
Adafruit Industries Podcast
Desk of Ladyada – LLMs Make EagleCAD Footprints, Daycare Edition

Desk of Ladyada – LLMs Make EagleCAD Footprints, Daycare Edition

Adafruit Industries vor 7 Monaten

0:00

19:50

Podcast

Adafruit Industries

198 Episoden

DIY electronics projects & much more

Bildung

Podcast aneignen

This week at the Desk of Ladyada, we're back to hardware... with a
baby in a bouncer and an LLM on the clock. The VCNL4010 proximity
sensor has been discontinued, so we need to move to the VCNL4030.
That means a new EagleCAD library file, and we're testing whether
Claude Code (Opus, high effort) can generate one straight from the
datasheet. Historically we’ve had to create a footprint for each
device we use - and one of our gripes is how annoying it is to
convert when manufacturers spec edge-to-edge pad dimensions instead
of center-to-center pitch, which is what every CAD tool actually
uses. In our experiment, Claude Code handled the math, got the pad
sizes (0.65 x 0.75mm) and pitch (1.05mm) correct on the footprint,
arranged logical pin grouping on the schematic and matched
pin-to-pad correctly.. It even matched our drawing style by
learning from existing Adafruit library files in the repo. The
whole run took about 4 minutes and 45 seconds.Nota bene: it's not
perfect! Our first pass had schem label overlaps and an unnecessary
exposed center pad (Gemini Deep Think was actually smarter about
skipping that pad). We also tried having Claude Code design a full
QT Py terminal BFF board... it worked-ish but needed enough
back-and-forth that doing it by hand would've been faster.
Footprint generation is ready for integration into our workflow -
maybe we’ll kick it off while we review the datasheet - but, full
board layout isn't quite there yet. Other things on the desk: we're
setting up OpenClaw to subscribe to every chip manufacturer
newsletter and generate daily reports on new components worth
stocking. New protos include the TMF8806 time-of-flight sensor from
AMS (up to 10 meters, and possibly simpler drivers than ST's VL53
series) and a PMW3901 optical flow sensor often used in drone
navigation. Visit the Adafruit shop online -
http://www.adafruit.com -----------------------------------------
LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Subscribe to Adafruit
on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the
Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/
----------------------------------------- #adafruit #claude #ai