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Hey all! I am about to send in my very first shipment to Boardsort. I am a brand new micro scrapper. As my yield has grown, I have been using Google's Gemini AI to help me learn to grade boards based on Boardsort's criteria. I will take a picture of both sides of boards and then ask the AI, who gives me the grade and the rational for the choice. I wonder about other seller and Boardsort grader opinions as to how well AI works. Please only opinions from those who have used AI and the results gained or lack thereof. Does AI help or does it create issues? Thanks

Boardsort is working on their own ai model, Oscar.

Ice used it a few times but never anything else and can't really speak to the accuracy of any.

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Here to learn more so I can recycle more
My grades are my own opinion and not an official grade from Boardsort

Awesome! I will have to read up on Oscar and how to use it on the site. I think I will put a note in the shipment letting the graders know it is my first one and that AI helped me grade. I'm sure they will let me know how it worked.

Oscar is a work in progress, they had it available briefly recently but it was back off last I looked.

_________________
Here to learn more so I can recycle more
My grades are my own opinion and not an official grade from Boardsort

Thankyou for letting me know.

For the benefit of anyone interested in this topic, I can share a little about Google Gemini AI.

The Pros:

1) It can source info directly from the Boardsort website, forums, pictures, etc. I believe it can source links in the forums also.
2) It brought me up to speed within a couple of days of taking pictures and helping me to know how a certain grade is visually attained.
3) The more I used it, the less I needed it, being able through repetition, to more easily identify board grades on the spot.
4) It helps me to identify things that I have no clue as to what they are. (You know, the rarer one-offs and MLCCs by color).
5) From a micro e-waste perspective, board components are sometimes hard to classify, and AI can see numbers on components and reference them.
6) AI helps me to know which board components are worth saving and which ones to leave alone, as it provides a wealth of information about them.
7) It is not a person, so it cannot get ticked off at you.....even if you get ticked off at it. :=)

Cons:

1) The Pros outweigh the Cons. However, if you are running a long thread with the AI, it may loose reference and have to be reminded of previous statements within that thread. I don't think it references other saved threads. So, it can and will make mistakes.
2) It can misidentify things, so you must follow your intuitions and if you have questions about anything it states, always follow up with your doubts in question form.

This was clear when I was preparing my shipment to Boardsort. I had some one-off CPUs that were hard to identify and the AI gave me categories that were worded slightly different from what is found onsite. The pictures did not exactly reflect what I had, so this added to my confusion. I think the AI must have gotten some of the categories from dated forum posts, or some obscure obsolete category used prior to Boardsort's most recent website changes. IDK, but it's important to clarify with the AI when an answer does not match the exact wording of the category. It can have you classify e-scrap incorrectly, and when flagged, I have had AI apologize when it recognizes a mistake and resubmit a different (correct) category.

Additional things to consider:

1) AI will sometimes make mistakes based on picture quality (lighting, shades, angle, etc)
2) Like all human communication, I might ask a question in such a way that the AI interprets other than what I meant.
3) I'm a technical troubleshooting kind of person, so this sometimes helps me to intuitively recognize when something doesn't make sense. The way I get around the issue, is I have learned to drill down with the AI to ask further questions until things get cleared up. So, how this plays out is if I see something the AI did not see, I will bring it up and/or send another picture.
4) AI is not a person, and it's a little disarming though when the AI communicates so well that you think it is a person. If you joke, it will joke. If you share just enough information about your technical background or troubleshooting experience to make a point, it will adjust it's language and talk to you through that frame of reference as you work together. So it is possible to develop a positive working interaction. I can see how humans will become reliant on AI. It literally saves days of research just to learn new complex things, taking a lot of the grind out of your day.


I hope Boardsort sees this post and provides me feedback on the shipment I am sending out today. It will tell me how well Gemini did in teaching me to grade my boards.