Eli Hughes

some final tweaks to kicad cruncher toon

the wavenumber internal tools installer webpage uses NES box art

Let me save you a year Dont use three js, etc. you need to go direct to loading vertex buffers and fragment shaders to do anything truly useful or performant.

Brewbot

the fermentation vessel artwork was one of the best. this board was part of an ultrasound probe that could measure acoustic scattering from C02 bubbles in active fermation processes. lol, place, route and a f$ck ton of firmware before all this AI nonsense. hand crafted!

A mistake I think many are making is "There is no moat". This is classic blunder when you don't have a full view of a system and said system is changing. One of the most powerful problem solving techniques i learned when studying acoustics was the Rayliegh-Ritz method. You solved a problem by minimizing a potential energy term. The blunder is thinking you have minimized the energy when in reality you moved it somewhere else. The moat is the same width as it has always been, it just doesnt live where you think it does. Making money will still be hard.

oh yea, forgot to mention this part i was tired last night.

the pcb-engine compositor. the sch/pcb are charts and projections of the greater whole.

The backup plan is putting in shitters and air-con. That should get me to retirement

if you are thinking you are safe from ai doing embedded, you are wrong. If you think you have a couple years for it to "catch up" you are going to be in hurt locker. i just got codex to create a torque-vector motor controller, 3-level PID w/ speed control loop. Real-time , cycle by cycle center aligned PWM updates. direct assembly code. No C, No OS, just direct to armv7. I spent an hour studying the implemenation... clark/parke transforms, dsp, etc. it is tight and matches the pc simulation model. handles all the wierd edges cases, overflows, windup, saturation, etc. at this point I think every framework, rtos, etc is a complete waste of time. fuck zephyr, fuck c, fuck freertos, fuck your stupid "HAL". I am doing straight asm for embedded now. It is literally faster (both in dev time and exe), the code is readable and 100% tuned for purpose.

this is essentially what we do w/ AI.

altium-cruncher "toon" 2026.9.20 now has some interesting features and bug fixes based upon some feedback on github 1. we now have initial support for altium's rigid flex stackups. it renders the polyimide and bend line references. check out the imu board 2. overhangs, edge launch connectors and reverse mount / mid mount parts render correctly. checkout the sexy led die in the toon render! github.com/wavenumber-eng/al…

altium-monkey 2026.9.18 release news & new features >> .intlib writer support. you can now arbitrarily package .intlibs as you see fit without a .libpkg. this means packing whatever symbols, footpints your want and having full control over parameters, etc . great for static builds/distributions of a library general idea was to create static library builds using ci/cd (headless, altium not needed to do the packaging) >>sch compiler/netlist with this release the sch compiler/netlist matches altium for an obscene number of cases. the internal test system has several hundred test case covering of multi channel, flat heirachical, .annotion file. this was a key feature and this update dialed it in a bit more >> some hardening on parsing oddball/old files, wierd unicode things and semi-corrupt files that certain version of altium woudl make. looking forward this fall (eta Nov): - headless gerber / odb++ / ipc-2581 output - proper embedded board array support - a new manfuactring intermmediate representation for customizing outputs - experimental rust / native port in the future you will be able to make manufacturing outputs without altium running (once again for ci/cd / cli / headless). goal is to fix every bug related to gerber/odb++/ipc2581 posted on the altium forum. altium-monkey will become the prefered gerber/manufacting output generator github.com/wavenumber-eng/al…

For those who follow the PCB automation space, this is where I am going and hope people follow. If you are interested in solving some really interesting problems, probably the most important programming language right now is LEAN I think in a couple years all of this nonsense about go vs rust vs c++ vs python will be total noise.

the toon shader worked pretty good on the toad board

my dream of pcb renders in the style of Legend of Zelda Wind Walker is now complete. altium cruncher "toon" is now available for kicking the tires. boards are rendered to svg for docs / cover art using a cell (cartoon) shading algorithm. here is a demo w/ @QVHenkel 's open source PiMX8MP dont let the 2d view fool you. this required a full 3d pipeline and some rather interesting algorithms to create. the open source geometer library is doing the math with altium-monkey doing the file parsing. github.com/wavenumber-eng/al…

if you ever think you should buy solidworks and the cloud 3d experience. don't. its garbage. i am so angry that I am going to make solid-monkey and decrypt the whole fucking format so people can escape