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mikeayles
396karma·75submissions·November 25, 2025
about
I build complex technical tools, from automated hardware development pipelines to raycasting engines in CAD software.
The DOOM on Engineering Tools Series:
OpenSCAD-DOOM: Raycasting in a parametric CAD language, now playable in browser. (The Register)
KiDoom: DOOM rendered on PCB traces. #1 on HN. (The Register, Hackaday)
ScopeDoom: Vector rendering on an oscilloscope via audio DAC. #1 on HN. (The Register, Hackaday)
The Serious Work:
Phaestus: Compiler for physical products. Generates schematics, PCBs, enclosures, and firmware from natural language.
Bitwise-MCP: MCP server for embedded systems. Indexes 1000+ page reference manuals with hybrid keyword/semantic search.
TOKN: Token-Optimised KiCad Notation. A compact encoding format that reduces schematic token count by 92%, enabling LLM circuit generation. Includes benchmark suite comparing model performance on hardware tasks.
Engine Simulator: Thermodynamic diesel engine model at 0.1° crank resolution, vanilla JS in browser.
I specialise in solving "impossible" technical problems and shipping validated products.
mike@mikeayles.com | mikeayles.com
recent activity (75 total)
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Thanks. Both good questions, and they come up a lot. To be clear, I'm fully behind decarbonising freight. It's one of the hardest sectors to clean up and it needs serious attention. But hydr…
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I was reading the NASA truck aerodynamics thread earlier and realised that commercial freight is one of those fields that touches everyone's daily life (everything you own arrived on a truck) but…
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Correct, the engines will have a peak reported torque at one particular RPM, usually quite low (maybe 900RPM off the top of my head), at higher RPM, the peak torque may only be 90% of the peak torque,…
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Correct, RPM and Torque (%) edit: images may be down for 5mins, migrating my blog to astro.
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To clarify, the air bags isolate the cab from the chassis. There is also suspension between the axles and the chassis which is 99% of the time air on the rear, leaf spring front. I haven't come a…
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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 approximate…
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A lot of the time, the idling you may hear next to a truck that's parked up on break may actually be a refrigeration unit. Most fleets have telematics that would give a driver a red flag if they …
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This is a bit counter intuitive, but Euro style cabovers are much quieter inside than a 'conventional'. Plus cabovers can have air spring suspension, they're often more comfortable. The…
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As someone who works in commercial fleet fuel economy (powertrain, not aero, but you keep an eye on the whole stack since technologies compound), it's worth noting how far the industry has moved …
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Ha, 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 nati…
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This 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:
htt…
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https://gemini3.devpost.com/ Targeting long running multimodal agents, think I tick most of the boxes in the brief!…
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I 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 gerb…
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I 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…
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https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1ihufa0/doom_running... …
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If geohot is involved, it wouldn't suprise me if it was the first proof of concept for each new hardware variant.
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So this isn't exactly putting pre-wired up blocks together, my intent behind phaestus is to essentially to get you from an idea to a prototype tangible product as fast as possible. I'm targe…
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I saw routing as equally as big of a headache as the schematic, so formalizing the layout to a grid means layout becomes a compilation problem, not a design problem. My intent for phaestus isn't …
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Done, https://phaestus.app/feed.xml . If there's any issues i'd appreciate the feedback, I haven't used an RSS feed in a while!…
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Feel free to star/watch the repo for the project at: https://github.com/MichaelAyles/heph I may be able to set up an RSS feed for the blog if that interests you?
edit: http…
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Sorry, could have been more clear, LLM's are great at architecting high level design decisions, but terrible at the nitty gritty - without better tooling (with the right tooling, such as https:&…
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Thanks, 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, an…
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Been working on this exact problem for a while now. The core issue isn't that LLMs are bad at circuits, it's that we're asking them to do novel design when they should be doing selectio…
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In a similar vein, I would recommend watching Cory Doctorow's presentation at 39C3,a post american, enshittification-resistant internet. https://youtu.be/3C1Gnxhfok0?si=uKDlYn33II…