Top all-time · #19998
Mike Ayles
Personal blog · mikeayles.com/blog · on HN as mikeayleshardwareprogramming
Mike Ayles's personal blog at mikeayles.com covers hardware and programming. Since 2025, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 32 times, most often “Show HN: Taalas-style on-chip LLM weights on a $250 AMD FPGA (60k tok/s)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-10, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog's post on running LLMs on FPGA hardware (KV260), which one commenter says could reach about 20k tokens/sec. The site also hosts a tokn project.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Blog & Portfolio - Electronics & Embedded Systems Engineer
Most-linked posts?
- Show HN: Taalas-style on-chip LLM weights on a $250 AMD FPGA (60k tok/s)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-08-10
- /2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-12-14
What Hacker News says?
I'm currently working on something that lets you describe a hardware product in plain English and get actual manufacturable files out — PCB, enclosure, firmware, the lot. Very early days still. Whilst I created a fork of toon for Kicad (called TOKN ( https://www.mikeayles.com/#tokn )), with the intention of using a reduced token format to generate schematics using LLM's, I could get the models to follow the syntax c…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (December 2025)”Submitted Show HN: KiDoom – Running DOOM on PCB Traces as a story · 362 points
HN discussionThanks, as a concept it has potential, I've leveraged some of my previous projects www.circuitsnips.com for inspiration for the subcircuit blocks, TOKN for more accurate parsing of schematics, and to a lesser extent even my datasheet MCP server and kicad-netlist tool, more info at https://www.mikeayles.com/ For the time being, I'm erring away from feature creep, even though I really, really want to though! For the s…
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on “"Anyone else out there vibe circuit-building?"”Submitted Are you sure OneDrive has got your back(up)? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionRewriting the backend Bitwise Cloud, my semantic search for embedded systems docs Claude Code plugin from Python to Go. The problem was the ML dependencies. The backend uses BGE-small-en-v1.5 for embeddings and FAISS for vector search. Both are C++/Python. Using them from Go means CGO, which means a C toolchain in your build, platform-specific binaries, and the end of go get && go build. So I wrote both from scratch…
Comment linking /blog/goformersearch/
on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)”Submitted Show HN: Taalas-style on-chip LLM weights on a $250 AMD FPGA (60k tok/s) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI just posted a Show HN of my most recent side project, a live demo of a tiny-llm implemented in FPGA fabric, hitting an aggregate peak of 60,000tok/s, but a 'usable' model at 21,000tok/s Writeup and demo here: https://www.mikeayles.com/blog/on-chip-llm-kv260/ Source and HDL here: https://github.com/MichaelAyles/kev-gpt Show HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49242475
Comment linking /blog/on-chip-llm-kv260/
on “Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)”Submitted Are you sure OneDrive has got your back(up)? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHa, no way, I also built this: https://www.mikeayles.com/#zookeeper https://zookeeperapp.com/ I wasn't incentivized enough to actually make it into a proper native app or submit to either store, but it's cool to see something taken to the next step.
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on “Show HN: Wildex – we built Pokémon Go for real wildlife”Submitted Does RAG Help AI Coding Tools? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttps://mikeayles.com Mainly electronics, kicad and other nonsense
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on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here?”Submitted Show HN: I reproduced the CL1 DOOM demo in 132 parameters as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThank you! I haven't tried circuitscript with LLMs yet, but I do plan to do so in the future. As the language is similar to python, hopefully it is able to work well syntactically. But of course, the correctness and accuracy of the circuit would be more challenging to get right. Your work at https://www.mikeayles.com/#tokn is very cool! This will be very useful when I try LLMs! I have seen both atopile and tscircuit…
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on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)”Submitted CO2 Is the Wrong Number: Greenhouse Gas Equivalents for Road Freight as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis looks awesome, great job. How effective at circuit generation are LLM's with the language? I tried similar, and could get syntactically correct files, but the content always had errors: https://www.mikeayles.com/#tokn What are your thoughts on atopile and tscircuit?
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on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)”Submitted Every Diesel Truck Has a Chemical Plant Bolted Underneath as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI also am building Phaestus, a 0 to product system, that builds entire products from scratch. https://www.mikeayles.com/#phaestus-wip It is capable of creating a PCB (and outputs gerbers, bom, pick and place files), an enclosure (written in SCAD, outputs an STL for printing), and firmware, which it's able to compile using a pio runner on railway and provides a binary, but also has a webserial flasher for ESP32's. Th…
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on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)”Submitted The Hydrogen Truck Problem Isn't the Truck as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI built a Pokédex for zoo trips for my girlfriend: https://www.zookeeperapp.com https://www.mikeayles.com/#zookeeper-wip It lets you take photos of all the animals you see to collect them, when you 'capture' a new animal, it gives you fun facts about them. I seeded it with UK zoos, but there's no reason it can't work elsewhere. It was built because the signage at a zoo we went to was terrible and we had no idea what…
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on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)”Submitted The Physics and Economics of Moving 44 Tonnes at 56mph as a story · 1 points
HN discussionyou may find this useful: https://phaestus.app/blog/blog0031 Edit: Forgot I also got doom running in openscad: https://www.mikeayles.com/blog/openscad-doom/ and doom running in openscad in the browser at https://doom.mikeayles.com/
Comment linking /blog/openscad-doom/
on “Open source CAD in the browser (Solvespace)”Submitted Show HN: Doom running in OpenSCAD at 10-20 FPS as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFor AI designed schematics, you need to check out flux.ai (and quilter for layout), I don't have anything to do with this, i'm a little jealous tbh, but having used it, it's not for me (but i'm making fairly complex, FuSa, type approved stuff, for the sorts of boards that would go into phaestus, it would probably be adequate) I'm pretty in the weeds when it comes to this stuff, First of all, I made https://www.circu…
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on “Show HN: AI in SolidWorks”Amazing project. Have you guys thought about running it or adapting it for FPGA-like approaches like this one below that reach Taalas-speed like 20k tok/sec on cheap hardware? https://www.mikeayles.com/blog/on-chip-llm-kv260/ 500 tok/sec is great but this would be 40x and it changes the kind of tasks that it could even be used for if you link it to fast tools too.
Comment linking /blog/on-chip-llm-kv260/
on “Show HN: Needle2: 14MB agentic LLM for phones, wearables, smart home and robots”I do now: https://www.mikeayles.com/rss.xml
Comment linking /rss.xml
on “The Physics and Economics of Moving 44 Tonnes at 56mph”I have done a deep dive here: https://www.mikeayles.com/blog/on-vehicle-hydrogen-generatio... Short answer, it takes more energy to generate than the energy it produces. You can do things like only producing electrical power from the alternator when decelerating, ensuring no load comes off the engine, but that would require accumulation as you're not actually burning fuel then either. But running the numbers on the…
Comment linking /blog/on-vehicle-hydrogen-generation/
on “The Hydrogen Truck Problem Isn't the Truck”Although this has dropped off the FP now, I wanted to finish my response, but wanted to follow up with some data: https://www.mikeayles.com/torque-rpm-time.png So, here is approximately a weeks worth of data (around 700l of diesel), looking at the histogram on the right hand side, theres an awful lot of time spent at 0-10% this is around 60% of the trucks time. https://www.mikeayles.com/torque-rpm-volume.png However…
Comment linking /torque-rpm-volume.png
on “A NASA Engineer Discovered a World of Semi Truck Aerodynamics by Accident”
