An engineer's emergency kit business card
boldport.blogspot.co.uk
boldport.blogspot.co.uk
The most impressive board designed using PCBmodE so far in my opinion is Saar's 'lifegame' http://boldport.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-lifegame.html
It baffles me that companies spend significant amounts of time and resources making a user experience that works great rather awful[1].
[1] See also: Flickr.
And now these light boxes. I don't get it.
Related to the BoldPort product though, I think electrical engineering world is world could use some better tools. Earlier in the week one of our electrical engineers spent a day helping to debug a new board. The problem ended up being a signal name was renamed in one place but not another. If the current EE design tools don't have refactoring support much less some sort of electrical "uninitialized variable" error, there must be room for improvement in these tools.
To your point about "uninitialized variable" nets, if the net was truly a singleton it would show up as such in a netlist report. This capability existed in board design tools I used 30 years ago. What might have happened is a renamed net might have been split into two different nets. E.g. a net that connected 10 places became two nets, one to 8 places, another to 2 places. Not a singleton.
There are additional checks that netlist generation tools can do. E.g. does every net have a "driver" or "output" on it, or does it consist of all "inputs". Absence of driver can easily be flagged as an error. However, there is one wrinkle. Sometimes, nets are "busses" and are bidirectional. Each pin of the net can be either an input or an output at various times. That's harder to detect as an error.
There are many ways to avoid problems like this. Two common ones: 1) READ THE LOGS. I'd bet even money that your problem shows up in the logs as a singleton net or as a net without a driver. 2) SIMULATE. Board functional simulation has been possible for over 30 years; it's not always done. Did your engineer simulate his design? Why didn't his simulation catch the problem?
Sometimes, in board design (as in FPGA design) it's faster and certainly easier to just get 99% of the way there ahead of time and debug the final few errors on the board itself. That might be the case here, so if your company made this decision a priori, then you shouldn't be surprised if you need to spend some time debugging a few simple errors.
BTW that sort of sloppiness just wouldn't fly in chip design. Chips are usually far far far too complicated; extensive pre-tapeout simulation is de rigueur. And it takes weeks (if you have much money and a very good relationship with a fab) or months to get revised silicon. Much easier to do a few cuts and jumpers to a board than to do a silicon spin.
As to "refactoring support", most CAD systems I was familiar with didn't have an easy way to rename a net across multiple "pages" of a board design. Maybe the tools have gotten better. IMO that sort of refactoring (if done extensively) is a losing proposition anyway. You're much better off with careful attention to detail up front. You should be very careful renaming nets that cross schematic pages; you wouldn't have the problem if you carefully thought about the names before you created the schematic.
In summary, even the best tools won't help a sloppy designer.
http://ajasmin.net/saved_page/an-engineers-emergency-kit-business-card.html
> In summary, even the best tools won't help a sloppy designer.
Sloppy engineering is bad. But excusing shitty EDA tools by suggesting the engineer is sloppy is not much better. Most EDA tools are crap at DRC (static rules that only cover geometry and physical connections) and user experience. (Most engineers wouldn't have access to very expensive tools that might be better than some.) You talk about FPGAs (I'm an FPGA/Verilog expert); have you ever looked at the logs? It's getting progressively better, but wading through hundreds and thousands of warning and info messages is not exactly the most effective way to tell an engineer that something might be wrong. Sure, you can write scripts, but the tools are shit out-of-the-box in finding problems and communicating them to the engineer. This is one example, but they're equally bad at guiding the engineer to good design practices that reduces faults, as I think they should.
Circuit design tools are worse, and engineers must rely on their experience and keen eye for detail. Some engineers don't have one or both of those. Are they sloppy? Can't the tools be more intelligent to help?
I think that there is a lot to improve in this domain, and I'm trying to do that with PCBmodE. Blaming the engineer and falling into the "digital Stockholm syndrome" isn't the way forward here.
You might not like my "sloppy" choice of words. But IMO the difference between good engineers and mediocre ones is exactly what you called a "keen eye for detail".
I agree the tools could be, and should be, a lot better. It's a copout by the tool vendors when they produce "thousands of warning and info messages". And yet the good engineer must wade through those messages. That is part of the necessary "get on with it" attitude.
I really like the concept. Time to to make my own PCB business card.
It loads slowly, poorly animates (what for?), scrolls abysmally, and prevents zooming in.
I'm sorry for the slightly off-topic comment, but I think this needs to be said. I long for clean, simple, readable web pages.
Indeed, ideally as part of such a move, they'd enhance G+ a bit[1] to cover the areas where it's currently weaker than blogger. Then everybody would win...
[1] E.g. better support for formatting articles; curently it only supports a rather pathetic subset of markdown.
Any template outside of the "dynamic view" category will be even better. Where better means to me "does not need JavaScript to display properly".
It was referenced here yesterday and now it ranks with "Programming MutherFucker" in my brain.
remember they almost shot and killed that MIT student that was wearing some circuits as art on her shirt
This resulted in me being detained for over an hour while they ran every possible test on it, inspected every single item in my carry on and even photographing every individual page in my notebook. I was then followed until I got on the plane and even had to confirm that I was on the plane before it was cleared to depart.
This was on a US domestic flight. I have flown with prototypes in Europe several times (international flights) and have never had any problems.
Either way: bringing nonstandard electronics, even things that are much less sophisticated than acceptable things like laptops etc. can cause you major headaches when the TSA is involved.
I'm wondering if you'd be better off carrying prototypes in a separate, custom piece of luggage, like a Pelican case. Something that says 'this is expensive and important', rather than 'someone made this in a garage'.
Now this happened some years before the spread of home computers, and computer terminals were not a familiar sight to the average person. When the two friends got to the hospital, a guard stopped them and asked what they were carrying. They explained that they wanted to take a computer terminal to their friend who was a patient.
The guard got out his list of things that patients were permitted to have in their rooms: TV, radio, electric razor, typewriter, tape player, ... no computer terminals. Computer terminals weren't on the list, so the guard wouldn't let it in. Rules are rules, you know. (This guard was clearly a droid.)
Fair enough, said the two friends, and they left again. They were frustrated, of course, because they knew that the terminal was as harmless as a TV or anything else on the list... which gave them an idea.
The next day they returned, and the same thing happened: a guard stopped them and asked what they were carrying. They said: "This is a TV typewriter!" The guard was skeptical, so they plugged it in and demonstrated it. "See? You just type on the keyboard and what you type shows up on the TV screen." Now the guard didn't stop to think about how utterly useless a typewriter would be that didn't produce any paper copies of what you typed; but this was clearly a TV typewriter, no doubt about it. So he checked his list: "A TV is all right, a typewriter is all right ... okay, take it on in!"
[Historical note: Many years ago, "Popular Electronics" published solder-it-yourself plans for a TV typewriter. Despite the essential uselessness of the device, it was an enormously popular project. Steve Ciarcia, the man behind "Byte" magazine's "Circuit Cellar" feature, resurrected this ghost in one of his books of the early 1980s. He ascribed its popularity (no doubt correctly) to the feeling of power the builder could achieve by being able to decide himself what would be shown on the TV. --ESR]
[Antihistorical note: On September 23rd, 1992, the L.A. Times ran the following bit of filler:
Solomon Waters of Altadena, a 6-year-old first-grader, came home
from his first day of school and excitedly told his mother how he
had written on "a machine that looks like a computer -- but
without the TV screen." She asked him if it could have been a
"typewriter." "Yeah! Yeah!" he said. "That's what it was
called."
http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/t/TVTypewriters.html
----
If you went ahead and assumed that TSA agents are really just cleverly projected computer algorithms (androids perhaps?), your predictions concerning their behavior probably wouldn't be far off.
Fixed that for you.
I fully acknowledge that "custom" and "different" are not equivalent concepts, but well, that's the rationale.
Edit: yeah, the same police force who had just freaked out over LED advertisements earlier that same year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_bomb_scare
Major Scott Pare of the State Police: "Again, this is a serious offense ... I’m shocked and appalled that somebody would wear this type of device to an airport."
Switch out 'wear' with 'carry' and we've got a future headline starring this device! Or indeed any device with exposed wires / circuits.
It's about as bright as carrying a realistic-looking toy gun into an airport.
And while I'm asking random questions, where did the cliche of the anarchist with the spherical black bomb with a fuse coming out the top come from? This icon was used for system errors on the original Mac, but it must be way older than that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(symbol)
There is an idea that it originated in WWII, when some German bombs featured overly complicated designs that purposely didn't explode all the time, because a live bomb is arguably worse than an already exploded bomb.
In 1922, Buster Keaton's "Cops" features a bomb-throwing anarchist: http://images.greencine.com/images/article/keaton-bomb-2.jpg (Buster unknowingly lights his cigarette with it)
And 1919, a 'Red Scare' cartoon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Come_unto_me,_ye_opprest....
But this has got to be older, as this type of throwing bomb was obsolete in the early 1900s. There's the Haymarket affair (1886): http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/haymarket/just...
I'm guessing that's the incident that ties this bomb to political activists. But the design is a lot older; the badge of Napoleon's grenadier guards is an image of this type of bomb, but the round throwing bomb is way, way older: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ming_Dynasty_fragmentatio...
Recognisably the same bomb, from the 14th century.
As far as the whole "potentially being shot." thing. I am unclear of what to say there. They are investigating a potential threat, if it was indeed a threat. The guns are necessary there. I am not clear how wearing an exposed circuit board connected to a 9Volt battery with what looks like putty is different from me waving a toy gun around in a bank. Should that imply that if someone had something that looked like a weapon, the cops shouldn't draw their guns? Sure, I don't disagree with the statement that not all bombs are open circuit boards. Neither are all open circuit boards bombs. How do you however practically implement an alternative solution in such a scenario? Complaining about the cops is useless unless you are bringing up a solid alternative.
There is no factual basis for linking her activities to a bomb threat. Bombs do not look like that. Perhaps a bomb could look like that, but a bomb can look like anything, like a rolling suitcase.
My solution is to allow cops to step in only if they have reasonable suspicion to believe a criminal act is taking place. An unrecognized object should not be considered a weapon unless it is being used in a threatening manner. Walking around an airport should not be considered threatening behavior.
I've gone through with lockpicks, booze, arduinos, rpis, various components and boxes full of electronic bits. Only major issue I've encountered was accidentally packing items in a box that shipped reloading supplies.
http://ossmann.blogspot.com/2011/02/throwing-star-lan-tap.ht...
PCB board for a LAN tap. Definitely one of the coolest business cards I've received- particularly at a hacker con.