The task at hand is drawing the circuit schematics for a robot I'm working on. I had already written down the components and the connections, all that's left is to draw it in KiCad. I had already started doing that, but then...
I got sidetracked forcing Gemini to create the circuit using KiCad.
I would have made progress if I had continued doing it by hand. I spent yesterday trying to generate an image of the final results. (Side note: Image gen 2 is clearly superior to nano banana 2 pro). In the end, I just got tired of prompting image gen models.
As I was about to start continuing it by hand, I just thought, why not have the AI go through the process, rather than skipping steps to the final output?
There were two routes to go down. The first was using "computer use", but I don't have a Claude pro or codex subscription. The other route was checking what format the schematic was stored in and having the AI generate that. Luckily, it was text.
So, I created the .kicad_sch file, pulled up examples, and checked documentation for the KiCad S-expression format to create a skill for Gemini.
I spent over 2 hours on that before checking to see if someone had done it before. And sure as rain, someone had (kicad-happy by aklofas). They've been working on it for some time and have made something usable.
I still have to play around with it a bit and tweak it. But I've set a strict limit for myself: if I'm not able to get it working by tomorrow, I'll go back to continuing by hand.
Because honestly, if I had spent half the time I spent on finding these "shortcuts" on actually doing the work, I would have been done by now.
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