About a homemade AI-driven probe arm for hacking hardware.
Has this happened?
Yes 19 (19%)Not sure 69 (70%)No 10 (10%)
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
Hacker News has set AI a lot of challenges over the years. Which ones has it met?
About a homemade AI-driven probe arm for hacking hardware.
Votes cast 1–2 October 2026: 100,590 votes from 9,694 people.
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] https://huntron.com/products/access2.htm