Desk of Ladyada – LLMs Make EagleCAD Footprints, Daycare Edition 🍼🦀
This week at the Desk of Ladyada, we're back to hardware... with a baby in a bouncer and an LLM on the clock. The VCNL4010 proximity sensor has been discontinued, so we need to move to the VCNL4030. That means a new EagleCAD library file, and we're testing whether Claude Code (Opus, high effort) can generate one straight from the datasheet. Historically we’ve had to create a footprint for each device we use - and one of our gripes is how annoying it is to convert when manufacturers spec edge-to-edge pad dimensions instead of center-to-center pitch, which is what every CAD tool actually uses…
The skinny
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