A week with ChatGPT, and an audio novice designed their own pedal circuit
Audio circuits had always intimidated them. They took apart a stereo effects pedal with ChatGPT, quizzing it on every part, then designed their own version in KiCad. A college-level crash course in a week.
Done withChatGPTSpotted· by HN user peteforde· Oct 15, 2026
Result Grilled it on every node, at all hours
“My journey was radically expedited by iterating through the entire process with a ChatGPT instance.”
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
Spent about a week fully reverse engineering a Stereomaker pedal, which uses a 5-stage all-pass filter. Shared zoomed photos of the board with ChatGPT and grilled it on how audio transformers, JFET soft-switching, ground lifts and voltage rails work. Then designed their own take on the circuit in KiCad, pasting in chunks of netlist and reasoning about capacitor values with it.
How it went
They describe it as a self-directed, college-level intensive in about a week, on a subject they’d been intimidated by and might never have tackled without being able to question an LLM at all hours.
Try it yourself with ChatGPT
I'm reverse engineering this circuit to learn how it works: [photos or schematic]. Go node by node. For each part of the circuit, explain what it does and why it was designed that way, quiz me to check I understood, and correct me when I'm wrong. When we're done, help me design my own version and sanity-check the component values.
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