Need to upload PCB Board FILE is a bad engineer's mindset!

Why?

Quilter , There should be a wizard for users to set parameters and then generate Quilter’s own board framework according to this wizard. As an AI for drawing PCBs, it is very strange to ask users to provide a nearly blank board settings file, because it is possible that we only know how to draw schematics and not PCB boards. This is a problem of understanding this project and should be resolved, otherwise it may block 80% of new users (dumb users). Because designers who specialize in designing and PCB layout, like professional photographers, do not use AI to process photos. Those who use AI are users from other fields who also need it

Hi @46561847 thank you for the feedback! I definitely understand where you are coming from as a non-professional PCB designer who wants to get started with PCB design.

Unfortunately this is not something that makes sense for us to tackle just yet. We’re focused on enterprise professional users where there just isn’t demand for this kind of feature yet. As a small company, we must stay laser focused - and the focus on professionals is therefore essential for now.

To do this feature well - there’s actually quite a bit that would be necessary. For one - we would need to identify and assign footprints to your components. We don’t focus on auto-generating footprints yet, and haven’t built out any integrations to grab them from existing databases (our customers prefer us not to touch their footprints because they typically have company-managed libraries that they must use).

The even bigger issue is: Quilter should not yet be used without expert human oversight. While we aim to be very clear in our UX with exactly what Quilter can and cannot account for - it’s still up to the expert human to decide if the design will meet all requirements and ultimately work. In many cases, cleanup and editing is required. For us to feel comfortable taking full responsibility for a layout (such that someone who really knows nothing about it can use the tool “blindly”) - we have much work to do.

As such - Quilter is not the best tool for beginners to learn PCB design. For now, it’s best positioned to accelerate those who already know how to do layout. For now :slight_smile:

With the modern state of all AI tools on the market - my wholehearted recommendation would be not to skip the learning. I would still recommend everyone learn to do the whole process manually - so that they learn everything that goes into it and what matters. AI tools for hardware are not at the level they are for software - and even the best users of AI-for-software deeply understand the software being written.

Check out our blog: Quilter Blog | AI PCB Design Insights, Case Studies & Engineering Guides - there are a bunch of hardware project there that we’ve posted about that have good details on schematics, starting board files, how Quilter was used etc etc. Also there are a ton of great educators on YouTube who can get you from zero to fully completed simple board in a half-day to a day of focused work. It’s worth learning.