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Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

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Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#221

Post by mawildoer »

vrinsd wrote: post #210
mawildoer wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're largely on board with the same problem's we're trying to tackle, and I most certainly understand why you're making these criticisms of these trivial examples and our current implementation. You're right to - these simple designs aren't where designing PCBAs with code will shine (we expect!). Currently when you discuss configuring a regulator, it's beholden upon the designer to understand enough of the internals…

Glad you're open to feedback. I don't know if your regulator response was directed at me or someone else, but using that as an example, if you take something like an LM7805/LM317 I think the 'parameterization' you're talking about (i.e. "input_voltage=12V", "output_voltage=3.3V", "accuracy=5%" --> let "tool" solve for resistors, and populate schematics/BOM) sounds cool and would work. But what if it's something like…

For sure! You've made two super important points; how can I trust it shuffling things under me and how can I justify trusting this thing if it's going in long-lead or production hardware (stuff that's hard to fix)

The first one is super interesting technically because there's a few routes by which engineers can gain trust in something, and in my experience code-generation often isn't the strongest of them. It's often the case that checking an answer is vastly easier than solving the problem in the first place. Our mid-term roadmap includes scripting tests (~pytest + SPICE in CI) and for a complex chip like that, I first expect that those params will tweak those tests, those tests will fail out of spec and the engineer needs to reconfigure it in that application while understanding the datasheet.

The next level is extremely similar, except the solver is selecting configuration component params based on cost-functions and rules, and this same test suite is validating the solution and providing the confidence needed to manufacture a prototype.

The final and important mechanism though is that you have a lockfile that lockdown the configuration of these discretes unless an engineer opens it up - yielding review as we'd have today.

The other half of this though - how can we confidently deploy this to production, is eased with the rigorous workflows software version control tools (github, gitlab) can enforce. If an engineer tweaks these params, you can use the tool to rigorously enforce review from the domain-specific-experts on the team. Currently, it's vastly too easy to slip something through (mostly unwittingly) in design review meetings, and these version control tools go a long way towards fixing that.

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#222

Post by joemi »

leptons wrote: post #181
andrewstuart wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I oh see you are wanting to diminish her capabilities for some reason. I'm not interested buddy, you can take your sneering elsewhere until you show me the multi million dollar company you have created, the hundreds of commercial quality boards you have designed and sold for real money, the driver software you wrote to make them usable and the industry accolades you have received - on merit.

> and sold for real money "Lady Ada" and Adafruit certainly are good at price gouging. They often charge exorbitant prices for the same stuff we can get elsewhere at a fraction of the cost. No, providing datasheets and some instruction isn't enough, there's a thousand other sites with better instructions in most if not all cases.

As far as I can tell, Adafruit doesn't price gouge. More expensive than some other US places, sometimes, but usually not by much. Sometimes they're cheaper than similar US places.

The only places that sell same or similar items for drastically less than Adafruit are places like Aliexpress (or the same foreign sellers selling on Ebay), and there are many reasons why Adafruit is more expensive than those places...

Some of the stuff Adafruit sell is likely sourced from Aliexpress (or perhaps from Alibaba if they're buying in large enough quantity) and is indeed priced higher at Adafruit, but that's because if they price it the same or lower they make no money. So we know for those items, they must mark them up. But how much they need to be marked up is kind of complicated. Buying lots of things in order to resell them is more complicated than buying just one or two things for yourself, especially when the seller is on the other side of the world. Simply put: there's a lot more overhead when buying for resale that you don't have to worry about when buying low quantities for yourself. One big difference is that they need _reliable_ suppliers with large quantities consistently available, and those are rarely the same sellers selling things for pennies. (I could go into more differences, because there are many, but this reply is already getting pretty long. Ask me if you want to know more, or google for info about how to open and run a retail business.)

Also, bear in mind that some of that stuff that you can get elsewhere at a fraction of the cost than Adafruit are actually Adafruit's own designs being directly cloned, like a lot of their breakout boards. In those cases, you really can't blame Adafruit, since the reason those items are cheaper elsewhere is because someone's specifically trying to undercut them (often at the expense of overall quality and sometimes even at the expensive of authentic correctly-working parts).

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#223

Post by 4b11b4 »

fxtentacle wrote: post #213

Did you know that the KiCad file format for schematics and PCB layouts is text? And it kind of reads like source code? You can even check it into Git. What stops electronics from becoming like programming is the routing. It's NP hard and even the big car companies haven't solved it yet, let alone any tool accessible to hobbyists and startups. So you spend an hour designing the schematics, a few minutes placing the co…

you can do this with the Freerouting plugin

it's non-trivial, you need to fiddle with parameters to encourage the autoroute towards certain behaviors. there are also some schematic patterns that lend towards better netlists and in turn better routing

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#224

Post by mNovak »

I agree some format to attach more metadata into schematics is useful, especially if enough good modules become easily available -- something as simple as "hey this is a 5V rated component" is nice not to have look up sometimes.

But to add to the wishlist of innovations in PCB layout; someone please give us better gerber editing/conversion tools. Geber strikes me as being very like pdf -- absolutely standard, well reproducible, but awful to edit in any way other than 'intended'.

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#225

Post by fxtentacle »

4b11b4 wrote: post #223
fxtentacle wrote: post #213

Did you know that the KiCad file format for schematics and PCB layouts is text? And it kind of reads like source code? You can even check it into Git. What stops electronics from becoming like programming is the routing. It's NP hard and even the big car companies haven't solved it yet, let alone any tool accessible to hobbyists and startups. So you spend an hour designing the schematics, a few minutes placing the co…

you can do this with the Freerouting plugin it's non-trivial, you need to fiddle with parameters to encourage the autoroute towards certain behaviors. there are also some schematic patterns that lend towards better netlists and in turn better routing

In general, yes, but when I tried it, all free autorouters (and the paid one in Altium) failed to do the fan-out/escape of the ESP32's BGA.

I then built a little CLI tool which used bitmap images and ConvNets to do just that one fan-out, but then I lost interest in it as soon as the PCB was finished.

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#226

Post by robomartin »

mawildoer wrote: post #217
robomartin wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random thoughts. I have a feeling that very few hardware projects have a bunch of people working on the same schematic. I have personally never experienced that in the context of a team project. What might happens is that each engineer works on a board and the interface between boards is defined by the team. I have done systems with 15 to 20 PCB's interconnected through custom backplanes this way. Modern EDA tools ha…

We hear you! We're most certainly planning on eating up the system's chain to describe, version control and validate up the system's chain. As one example in an earlier (and likely future) permutation of atopile we could compile harnesses (using the fantastic https://github.com/wireviz/WireViz ) by linking two interfaces on connectors. Long future, if you can integrate mechanically too, you can at least check if not…

Many of the things you mention are not really done in hardware.

For example, unit tests. Even in FPGA designs, you can run functional simulations on portions of a design to help save time and validate. I don't believe we are yet at the stage where we simulate the entire chip. Not sure it would make sense even if you could. You have to worry about real-world effects such as clock skew and jitter that might not necessarily be deterministic. If you have designs running at hundreds of MHz or GHz, at one point you have no option but to run the design on the real IC and debug in hardware.

The other issue is that every company is likely to have their own process for some of the things you mention. Harness design and manufacturing is a good example of this. Companies like Siemens, Zuken, TE and others have professional solutions that often integrad with CAD/CAM tools (like Siemens NX) and produce professional manufacturing-ready documentation. Job shops, in many cases, are setup to receive files from industry standard tools and work directly from them. WireViz is a neat tool, but it is pretty much at the hobby level.

For example:

https://rapidharness.com/

https://www.zuken.com/us/product/e3series/electrical-cable-d...

https://www.sw.siemens.com/en-US/vehicle-electrification-wir...

You should not be discouraged though. That said, I would still urge you to interview a lot of EE's and product design engineers to really understand what you are walking into. You need to realize that you are not likely to change the entire product design and manufacturing industry just because you offer a software-like approach to design. That's just not going to happen. Industries have tons of inertia and they tend to only be interested in solving pressing problems, not adopting entirely new workflows. Also, the EDA/CAD/CAM industries are paved with the corpses or thousands of offerings that, collectively, over time, defined how things are done today.

My guess is you'd have to raise $100MM to $300MM, hire tons of engineers and devote ten solid years to materially influence how things are done. Nobody has the time or budget to introduce new tools, new problems, new training and grind their entire product development process to a halt just to adopt a new paradigm.

I'll give you an example of this from real life. The CAM tool we use to program our CNC machines is crap. We use CAMWorks Professional, which integrates with Solidworks and probably cost us $30K+ per license (between initial purchase and maintenance fees). We want to switch to at least doing CAM using the Fusion360 tools. However, this will definitely cause us to take a hit in productivity and possibly put out bad product for a period of time until the dust settles. And so, while we absolutely detest CAMWorks, we have no choice but to continue using it until a window of opportunity presents itself to make the switch. And, of course, also knowing full-well that the Fusion360 solution isn't utopia. There are no perfect tools. Just choices you might be forced to live with.

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#227

Post by crote »

michaelt wrote: post #6

Very nice! The state of electronics tooling has long been extremely bad - 99% of people who put a regulator into their schematic will want an appropriate input and output capacitor as the datasheet demands. 99% of people who put a microcontroller will want a crystal and a programming port and a reset pin pull-up. It's only because of closed source tools stuck in the stone age that the state of the art is to copy out…

> It's only because of closed source tools stuck in the stone age that the state of the art is to copy out of a PDF.

Not really. KiCad is open-source and a very capable EDA suite, for example.

The problem is that it's a really hard problem for which no one-size-fits-all solution exists. There's basically an infinite number of properties which are important when designing electronics, many of which will have to be nudged depending on your design. Capturing all that in a data format is virtually impossible, and any attempt to do so is likely to degrade into something unusual quite quickly once you get past the trivial stuff.

In my experience reading it out of a PDF is usually not that big of a deal, once you get used to it. For things like schematics symbols and footprints there are data interchange formats available - and there's a pretty decent chance these days they'll be openly available for the part you are using. But they always contain mistakes, and I find it way faster to just roll my own from the PDF than to copy it ready-made from a 3rd party and fix the errors.

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#228

Post by robomartin »

mattclarkdotnet wrote: post #220
robomartin wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random thoughts. I have a feeling that very few hardware projects have a bunch of people working on the same schematic. I have personally never experienced that in the context of a team project. What might happens is that each engineer works on a board and the interface between boards is defined by the team. I have done systems with 15 to 20 PCB's interconnected through custom backplanes this way. Modern EDA tools ha…

This is all so true! But it also describes the problem very well. Of course a $100k CNC machine design will always be developed by a small team collaborating as you describe. But the tools and processes that work for that most emphatically do not work well for smaller projects with more distributed contributors. Custom PCBs are so easy to order these days, but they are hellish to design and test well. That would chan…

> smaller projects with more distributed contributors

Smaller projects are either handled by one or a few engineers, with each looking after one or more disciplines. I can't see collaboration on a PCB as a thing.

For example, I have personally done electrical, embedded code, FPGA and full mechanical design and manufacturing on many products that can be described as one or a few PCB's with I am open to the idea that I just don't have the experience in a domain where more than one engineer actively works on a single circuit board. By "actively works" I mean, simultaneous editing of portions of the PCB with the equivalent of a team leader handling pull requests, etc.

I have worked on PCB's full of analog and digital chips in the 30 x 30 cm range (12 x 12 in) entirely on my own while other engineers worked on other boards that plugged into the same backplane. I have never worked on a single board where anyone else is running simultaneous edits. The closes I have gotten to that would be a power electronics engineer "blessing" a switched mode regulator design that I then manually integrate into my work (and so do others).

So, yeah, don't know. I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who regularly works in an environment where simultaneous team editing of a single PCB happens in the same manner as one might with something like VSCode and "Live Share" collaboration sessions.

Sorry, I just don't know if that proposal is realistic. Not my range of experience, which means nothing at all.

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#229

Post by crote »

helpfulmountain wrote: post #52
napowderly wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifically on the layout section, I have been thinking along the lines of start with sensible 'seed' layouts that users will contribute, then mutate the layouts with a physics driven solver. Imagine links between components as a spring and repulsion forces to model creepage/clearance distances, you could imagine the layout warping into a suitable shape for your board. I am pretty excited to get to this bit.

As someone who just taught themself Kicad to make a simple MIDI controller PCB usi an STM32F4, I was totally blown away, coming from software, how "manual" everything was, how abstruse and arcane. It's quite difficult as a beginner to know that a design is "correct", or perhaps "correct enough", with respect to component placement and EMI. It seems like even top EE who specialize in board design utilize rules of thum…

> It seems like even top EE who specialize in board design utilize rules of thumb rather than rely on simulation.

Yup, almost 100% this. Most parts of most boards are pretty trivial, and the design decisions you make don't really matter all that much. Unless you're working at a company the size of Apple, it really doesn't make sense to spend several hours of engineering time to figure out if that $0.001 decoupling capacitor is really needed.

And in the end it's often a lot easier to just build the thing and test if it works. We see the same in programming: it's technically possible to mathematically prove that some programs are correct, but in practice you can get 99% of the way there for all programs in a fraction of the time by just writing a bunch of unit tests.

Simulation is definitely done, but it's limited to the really hard stuff like antenna design or high-speed signalling.

Re: Show HN: Atopile – Design circuit boards with code

#230

Post by crote »

napowderly wrote: post #26
chrsw wrote: post #23

Part of the magic here would be to get your team's hardware engineers to adopt a more software development style workflow.

Indeed, the ability to branch and merge is a pretty exciting concept for me as a hardware designer. Another simple one is building artifacts in CI and doing quality checks, I have make some silly manual errors that have been very expensive during export.

> Another simple one is building artifacts in CI and doing quality checks, I have make some silly manual errors that have been very expensive during export.

I set up a CI pipeline for the hardware company I worked for. It automatically generated things like gerbers and board renders for each commit, and made them available as PNGs. I added a little tool which made it really easy to view the results side-by-side, and see both the front and the back. It definitely saved us from some really expensive mistakes a few times!

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