AutoDesk Releases An Electronics Simulator Called 123D Circuits

There is no such thing as a 1K resistor as in 1000.000 ohms. At least not unless you pay an insane amount of money. What there is, is a random-ish spectrum of values where sorted into EIA "preferred value" bins, 10% tolerance resistors that are too high to fit in the EIA E12 bin of 820 ohms, but too low to fit in the EIA E12 bin of 1200 ohms, are by definition dropped into the EIA E12 bin for "1K" resistors.

So a lot of (good) modeling work is screwing around with placing the "wrong" value resistors, simulating, and seeing what happens. So you've got a budget constraint such that you'd like to use cheap 10% resistors. An a theoretical equation said 1063.237 ohms is just right. So you'd superficially think simulating a 1K resistor is good enough, but you really need to simulate what happens when you insert a perfect 820 or a perfect 1200... Will it explode and kill people, or merely clip and distort into a guaranteed product return and/or unhappy customer? In which case its time to start fighting with the boss to spend some extra nickles (times millions of units) to install 5% or 1% resistors. Or maybe it doesn't matter and you get to save some dough.

What makes it even more exciting is quite a few performance characteristics depend on multiple devices. You're not building a little small signal RF amp with one real world random resistor in the bias ckt and every other component is theoretically perfect. No, both your base bias resistors and collector resistor and transistor beta and everything else is "fuzzy".

There exist semi-automated tools to fuzz-n-sim for the pros... this will only confuse the heck out of the noobs so its not often discussed.

Imagine if when you wrote code, you didn't really write "if-then" and "do-while" and "for-loop" but really wrote things that are within 10% of a "do-while" almost all the time, but its never really perfect. And that's what EE work is like. Fun, eh?

Not just for kids anymore.

MakerBot themselves base their designs heavily on both the open hardware RepRap and open designs by other commercial manufacturers, and their head honch Bre Pettis was a big proponent of open hardware and maker culture - even publicly humiliating newbies to the community on his blog for failing to the files associated with their designs, insinuating that they were somehow undermining the maker community. [1] (In reality, they were trying to but couldn't figure out how because they used their PCB house's free proprietary software which couldn't export - we're talking a tiny hobby operation here.)

Then he went against the very principles he publicly shamed others for failing to follow and turned MakerBot's hardware and software proprietary in order to make more money.[2][3] All the people who politely but firmly criticised him for failing to live up to the same standards he held were accused of using "language similar to that we usually hear from people who blow things up" and "fundamentalism" by another maker[4]. This was linked supportively by one of the most prominent companies, Adafruit.[5] Anyone who suggested that comparing other members of the community to terrorists was incredibly inflammatory itself, or linked Bre Pettis' own views on others who took open hardware closed, was labelled a "troll" and had their comments deleted. People who correctly figured out that MakerBot was taking their hardware closed based on Bre's non-denial denial[6] were called liars and accused of spreading rumours. Remember, Bre's own public humiliation of newbies with much less power than him didn't get this kind of criticism.

So yeah. I'm basically done with open hardware and the maker community. It looks like a way of suckering people into doing big businesses' work for them and then labelling them terrorists when they ask said businesses to uphold their end of the bargain. I guess it's profitable for some though.[7]

[1] http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2010/03/25/open-source-ethics-a...

[2] http://www.hoektronics.com/2012/09/21/makerbot-and-open-sour...

[3] http://openalia.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/the-definitive-make...

[4] http://www.tigoe.net/blog/category/open-innovation/408/

[5] http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/09/21/in-defense-of-open-s...

[6] http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2012/09/20/fixing-misinformatio...

[7] http://allthingsd.com/20130619/makerbot-sells-to-stratasys-f...