boldport

As a followup, I've written a 'defence of the "sloppy" engineer' http://boldport.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/in-defense-of-sloppy-...

Author of article. Someone posted a static version of the page:

  http://ajasmin.net/saved_page/an-engineers-emergency-kit-business-card.html

I hope you like it.

> 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.

The author (me) doesn't usually consider the TSA when designing PCBs ;) (Happy to tell everyone who are concerned that the author's YC application was not accepted so this particular design won't be a problem.)

I will test that, although I'd normally expect this brand name service's back-end to handle this stuff gracefully.

That's a thought. I'm interested in new mechanical configurations of components, and how to hide/embed them into the board in interesting new ways.

I'm the author and maker of this board. The blog is hosted on blogger (Google). When I decided to use blogger I wrongly assumed that it will 'just work' across platforms, but it hasn't been the case, unfortunately. There isn't much I can do in terms of configuration, and the only option is to find a new blogging platform, which I may do in the future.

Thanks! ;)