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Comment by cushychicken | Hacker News Reader

I have to give JITX credit - every time I see their latest product offering, it gets closer to something I’d actually use. (Working EE who primarily does board and system design.)

These layout automations they show in the landing page are the first thing they’ve showcased that I’m intrigued enough to want to try for myself.

The thing I wonder about with all of these EDA companies is whether any of them understand that they’re not attacking the biggest problem of circuit design.

Capturing the SCH/PCB is a relatively small part of the process of getting a working design ready to sell. Less than ten percent of the time, I’d guess. The bulk goes in to design documentation, testing, certification, compliance, and DFM/DFA.

A part of me sort of hates to see these companies do their thing, because it’s making the fun part of the job shorter and faster.

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Thanks! We're working hard -- I just added that animation this morning and I have a few more to do.

I like your perspective on tackling the biggest problem. We can show a lot more of how users have been doing automation for firmware, docs, testing, etc ...

An underrated part of an autorouter is that you can enforce rules for DFM (and SI) automatically, so some of that tougher stuff is addressable with the right approach. Including a lot of compliance.

Certainly not trying to shrink the fun part - tried to make layout more of an optimization tool than a drafting tool. Although "I should not be doing this" is a mentality a lot of EEs bring to layout.

I like your perspective on tackling the biggest problem

I’d be happy to generate some additional perspectives on your tool if there’s a way I can try it without spending $10k or going back to college for an .edu email address XD

An underrated part of an autorouter is that you can enforce rules for DFM (and SI) automatically, so some of that tougher stuff is addressable with the right approach. Including a lot of compliance.

You must be referring to an autorouter tool I’ve never tried. (Maybe your own?) All the ones I’ve ever seen produce trace fanouts that look like regurgitated spaghetti.

"I should not be doing this" is a mentality a lot of EEs bring to layout.

Probably explains why so many EEs struggle to get their designs to pass radiated emissions compliance tests. Layout is still circuit design: you just don’t know any of the component values you’re dealing with. Gotta learn to make good choices once you understand how board parasitics work.

Unrelated - I’m pretty sure I spoke with you or one of your cofounders about your product in comments when you first launched. I asked you about emissions compliance and I think DDR trace matching and routing in a comment thread. Glad to see you got at least one of those problems licked.

I like phrasing layout as circuit design

Technically it is, all the components on a PCB are connected together with bundles of resistors, inductors, capacitors, and antennas that we simplify into something called a "trace".

I’ve never understood layout as being secondary. The artwork matters a great deal ensuring the design works and works well.

Also - as a side note - everyone in this comment thread kvetching about your tool’s price clearly doesn’t understand:

1) the value a good EE design brings to an organization, or

2) the amount of money selling electronics is worth to a company

You have to feed yourselves and your employees, and all the companies who really need this tool are ones that have no problem spending 10k per year to make their engineers more effective. (Thinking of Lockheed Martin here as they’re one of your flagship customers.)

The average Kicad hobbiest wants this, but doesn’t need it. At least, not in the same way someone with a boss, a program manager, a deadline, and four projects to support does.

> The average Kicad hobbiest wants this, but doesn’t need it. At least, not in the same way someone with a boss, a program manager, a deadline, and four projects to support does.

Yeah, but they're also never going to pay for it (or not anything close to this price) in a personal capacity.

So give it away free like for current students (would I get away with an alumni^ address I wondered) and generate hype, Youtube content, a pipeline of prospective employees who encourage their employer to adopt it; raving at work about how good it is for their hobby projects and would solve all the problems their having, etc.

^that's the genitive singular, lest you think it erroneously plural ;)

I think it is completely lost on this fresh companies that make commercial production software that the reason their "competitors" can charge $10k/mo is because they are entrenched and established.

If you are new on the scene, give it to .edu for free and charge everyone else $100 for an annual license. If your product is legitimately good, in ten years you will be the entrenched and established one.

Thank you. Talking to EEs that do this every day I hear "Well this would have to save me 1 day per month to be ROI positive".

Turns out saving that day is incredibly hard, because the professional workflows are intense.

Value of the product ends up being non-linear: either you're valuable enough to be in an EE's regular workflow saving time, or you're not. Worth a whole lot once you are, worth next to nothing if you are not.

> The average Kicad hobbiest wants this, but doesn’t need it.

Tbh, that's true for lots of things.

Personally, I spend about 2% of a projects time on kicad related stuff, and the rest on software development for the board.

Anything complex enough to require real knowledge and experience I'd rather hire a board and circuit designer.

> A part of me sort of hates to see these companies do their thing, because it’s making the fun part of the job shorter and faster.

For sure! PCB layout is one of the best and most enjoyable parts of the job.

My major concern with these products is always the quality of the schematics they produce. It's not enough for a schematic to have all the nets connected correctly - a schematic is a piece of documentation that, when drawn well, should convey a lot more information than simply what pin is connected to which others.

I'm not an EE, so please understand this as a sincere question: wouldn't the code and its comments become documentation that would otherwise be in the well-drawn schematic?

As an outsider, my assumption is that the schematic would become less of a design document and more of a simple visualization.

What am I missing?

>wouldn't the code and its comments become documentation that would otherwise be in the well-drawn schematic?

Technically, yes, but 99% of EEs would not approve of code in some weird new DSL as documentation for a circuit. While it may contain the same information as a drawn schematic, it is much more inscrutable and introduces mental overhead when you actually need to read it.

There's also a huge difference between a poorly laid out schematic and an excellent one; the latter makes it easier to follow the flow of signals and power through relevant parts of the circuit and allows you to easily pick out the different parts/modules and how they play their part in the circuit as a whole, all with a quick glance at a drawing.

I guess a (poor) software analogy would be that you could surely implement a function as a bunch of GOTOs and/or BRANCH commands, but just making a nested for loop would make the logic much clearer.

Yes absolutely this.

The major issue is that there are a lot more stake-holders in a schematic design than just the person who draws it.

Often the person who draws the schematic is not the person who lays out the PCB, so the schematic needs to encode information about how to lay the PCB out. For example, you may have several components in parallel in a filter circuit; the order that they are placed on the schematic can be used to communicate which order they should be placed on the board (but does not affect the electrical correctness of the schematic at all), and this in turn helps to betray the function of these components.

Even if the whole PCB design is being done by one engineer, other engineers need to be able to review it. If a schematic is electrically correct but otherwise a mess, it makes reviewing it a lot more difficult.

Then there will be third-parties who need to read the schematic and understand the design - for hobbyist products this could be the end-users, and in consumer products it might be service engineers. A well drawn schematic makes a PCB easier to understand and therefore easier to debug, repair, and modify.

In the analogy of software vs schematics, schematics are both code and documentation at the same time.

Schematics ended up being a hard requirement, so we put in the work to generate good ones automatically and the tools for EEs to adjust the aesthetics without ruining the correctness of the design.

You are right that the schematic becomes visualization/documentation here - it's not necessary to generate, because the only information it technically provides is a netlist which we already have from code.

But it's needed documentation. In practice it's helpful to use as you debug your design code.

There are some electronics products where schematics hardly convey anything. Heavily digital stuff is often just a whole bunch of squares with dense rows of lines connecting them. Maybe a few caps and resistors here and there.

For analog stuff though, a schematic is absolutely fundamental to understanding how the circuit works and how to troubleshoot/fix it. Handing an engineer a code description of an analog circuit will basically have them just trying to mentally build the schematic in their head while reading it.

Imagine a model sharing 3D printing website that got rid of all the 3D model representations and just put the model code in their place. It would be borderline useless (despite your 3D printer having no issue still printing the stuff). Similar situation.

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