Guy builds AI driven hardware hacker arm from duct tape, old cam and CNC machine

by scaredpelican on 4/16/2026, 9:56:37 PM

Comments

by: Animats

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] <a href="https://huntron.com/products/access2.htm" rel="nofollow">https://huntron.com/products/access2.htm</a>

4/16/2026, 11:07:14 PM

by: uSoldering

It’s hard to imagine anyone wanting this to be real more than I do, but this is nowhere close to being ready to do actual work. Photographing real PCBs is hard, there is no fiducial maths, no actual probing is being done. It's just photos of a photo being piped into an agent. If it actually did what it claims, no reasonable person would exclude it from the demo video.<a href="https://gainsec.com/2026/04/16/autoprober/" rel="nofollow">https://gainsec.com/2026/04/16/autoprober/</a>

4/17/2026, 12:13:41 AM

by: Havoc

Can't say I fully understand it but this certainly smells like someone is getting hired off a single github repo as CV

4/16/2026, 11:00:18 PM

by: kuizu

A similar concept, but with multiple probes at the same time, was published in this blog series as open source hard- and software: <a href="https://www.schutzwerk.com/en/blog/proboter-01/" rel="nofollow">https://www.schutzwerk.com/en/blog/proboter-01/</a> They explain some of the use cases in this demo video <a href="https://youtu.be/TYEjZA-xbGo?is=osWXCrBkLOi4JHxO" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/TYEjZA-xbGo?is=osWXCrBkLOi4JHxO</a>

4/17/2026, 6:16:40 AM

by: claytonia

Cool demo, but letting an AI Agent drive a physical probe may have problems. AI is probabilistic, but hardware is precise. If the model miscalculates a pin's position by even 0.1mm, the probe may crush the board. I am curious how the author actually bridges the gap between the Agent’s 'guess' and the sub-millimeter precision needed to avoid damaging hardware?

4/17/2026, 3:51:10 AM

by: lrvick

This looks super useful, but I wish authors could stop doing these silly "source available" plays.Instead of donating to a project one has to buy GPU time to convert it to FOSS.

4/17/2026, 8:27:49 AM

by: odie5533

Guy builds car from stick of gum, paperclip, and an old vehicle

4/17/2026, 12:38:00 AM

by: chromacity

It's both cool and a bit confusing. Is this an attempt to commoditize flying-probe testing for PCBs? An attempt to use LLMs to reverse-engineer circuits? Both?It almost feels like it would benefit from being split into two projects. If I'm testing my own PCBs, I probably don't want an agent in charge, at least not routinely. There's just no reason for the added cost, complexity, or non-determinism. And if I'm reversing someone else's design, then going through the effort of building an auto-prober seems like an overkill, especially since a single probe is seldom enough. Even the simplest serial interface will often have one line for clock and another for data, so you're gonna be manually making connections either way.

4/16/2026, 11:05:11 PM

by: Jamesbeam

Finally i don’t need to press any buttons on my bionic arm any longer, the AI can find the pin on its own.What a glorious time to be alive.Claude really is going to bring pleasure to the people.<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgtO5sebA9U" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgtO5sebA9U</a>

4/17/2026, 9:48:19 AM

by: esbranson

> digitally guided fabrication> New York[1][1] <a href="https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/keeping-new-yorkers-safe-governor-hochul-highlights-growing-support-nation-leading-proposals" rel="nofollow">https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/keeping-new-yorkers-safe-go...</a>

4/17/2026, 12:03:32 AM

by: NegativeLatency

Would be cool if you could use this (with 2 probes) to build a wiring net for reverse engineering.

4/17/2026, 4:07:29 AM

by: vatsachak

Same guy who made the Flock hacking tool

4/17/2026, 12:22:59 AM

by: shevy-java

I watched the linked in video:<a href="https://videos.files.wordpress.com/gD3kAWlO/autoprober-demo.mp4" rel="nofollow">https://videos.files.wordpress.com/gD3kAWlO/autoprober-demo....</a>But I am not sure what do I see there? Is that some 3D printing?

4/17/2026, 5:41:29 AM

by: callumprentice

I figured this was some kind of home-grown prosthetic arm whose wearer could, using AI, draw any artwork online, speak ASL, perform minor surgery on themselves and so much more so long as their supply of tokens lasted.Perhaps a smidge disappointed when I had a look and discovered it wasn't that :)

4/17/2026, 1:49:53 AM

by: nullc

Maybe put the probe on a spring loaded linear sensor, and move down until it hits a target offset (could just be read by a simple flag in an optical sensor)-- resulting in hitting a constant target force.

4/16/2026, 10:45:02 PM

by: burgerone

Annoyingly misleading title unfortunately.

4/17/2026, 7:52:22 AM

by: sanieldoe

This is amazing! Limitation breeds creativity indeed

4/16/2026, 10:17:16 PM

by: scaredpelican

How does this only have a single star.This is genuinely mind blowing.

4/16/2026, 9:56:37 PM

by: deanputney

Wow that's nuts. What a great idea! I wonder how much of this the commercial flying probe machines can do already. Pretty cool to be able to have this on a home scale.

4/16/2026, 11:03:48 PM

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