#531 – Footprints and Symbols with Natasha Baker

Comments

1. Sergey says

   February 23, 2021 at 4:11 am

   My respect to Natasha, but when she is saying that Snap eda can be used as it is without checking- don’t believe it. I found a many many mistakes there – mirrored footprints, origin placed on pin1 instead of the center (this is where centroid name comes from!), wrong 3D models, wrong footprints. Looks like they use interns to make all of this.

   • Dave says

     February 28, 2021 at 10:59 pm

     It always comes down to the old adage “Trust but Verify”!

2. vincent himpe says

   February 23, 2021 at 10:12 am

   IPC is overrated. They are years behind the industry and are in conflict with their own documents. According to the land-pattern standard the toe of a pin should land within the pad, according to their manufacturing standard it is ok for the toe to stick out beyond the pad … go figure. And for many packages the toe is non-wettable anyway.
   As for snapeda : their symbols suck. Connectors are just a rectangular blob , often the pin order is wrong. The order should be as it is on the connector. Integrated circuits same thing. Nothing is grouped by function, pin names are incomplete. Opamps need to be drawn as an opamp , not a blob.

   Their footprints do not follow IPC . They are still using the dot for pin one while IPC has moved to a line or corner mark. for BGA three corners should be marked with the pin 1 corner left unmarked so the AOI can position check. Also : the courtyards are defined wrong. A courtyard needs to encapsulate ALL objects and that includes silkscreen. It is also heavily advised to use rounded rectangle pads as opposed to rectangles since it gives better paste release.

3. vincent himpe says

   February 23, 2021 at 10:18 am

   On components that have thermal pads: there needs to be a windowpane design for the paste mask and a thermal via farm.

4. Adrian says

   February 23, 2021 at 2:01 pm

   Great show and great guest.

   That being said, I squirmed when Chris asked whether Natasha can push vendors to provide a standardized way to get symbols, parts, models. Be careful what you wish for!

   I think there’s a big danger of creating another middle man’s walled garden. IMO, vendors and distributors relying on services like SnapEDA instead of offering open format data on their website is no better, if not worse than Ultra Librarian, and definitely a step back from today’s situation. The benefits of a symbiosis between SnapEDA and vendors are not automatically aligned with the interests of the lay engineer.

   • vincent himpe says

     February 23, 2021 at 2:22 pm

     It wouldn’t be that hard to have an open format.
     [] denotes choice of 1
     denotes optional parameter

     FOOTPRINT,[NAME],[MM/MILS]
     SMTPAD,[TOP/BOTTOM],X,Y,LENGTH,WIDTH, ,,
     PAD,X,Y,[ROUND,RECTANGLE],X,Y,LENGTH,WIDTH,HOLESIZE,,
     LINE,[COURTYARD,ASSEMBLY,TOPSILK,BOTTOMSILK],WIDTH,X1,Y1,X2,Y2
     VIA,X,Y,holesize,ringsize
     RECTANGLE,[SOLDERMASK,PASTEMASK],x1,y1,x2,y2
     MODEL,[FILENAME_IN_SAME_DIRECTORY]

     you don’t need more than that to make footprints
     a simple parsing script can translate that into your cad package format.

     • vincent himpe says

       February 23, 2021 at 2:25 pm

       same for symbols:
       PART,[DESIGNATOR],[NAME],[FOOTPRINT]
       PIN[NORTH,EAST,SOUTH,WEST],NUMBER,NAME
       LINE,x1,y1,x2,y2
       RECTANGLE,x1,y1,x2,y2,INNERCOLOR,OUTERCOLOR
       ARC,X,Y,RADIUS,STARTANGLE,STOPANGLE

5. Anthony May says

   March 30, 2021 at 6:39 am

   I was at that Hardware Developers Didactic Galactic meetup night in SF (late-2017?/early-2018?) where Natasha demo’d SnapEDA, with Chris asking some very hard questions about “trust”-related issues (quality of data).

   I sampled SnapEDA then, and was left severely wanting, particularly with the ridiculous import process one had to go through to get their lib into Altium (and most of that blame lies at Altium’s feet for its close-source lib format).

   I tried again recently, some 3 years later, for an ATmega328P chip symbol/footprint; one would think that such a pedestrian part would be well and truly nailed by now. But the symbol library file delivered in Altium format was completely empty, tho there was at least a footprint! *sigh*. The Particle Argon/Boron didn’t seem to be there at all, in symbol/footprint form (though I could buy it from them! lol).

   I’d love SnapEDA to be able to deliver on its stated mission, and I’m right there with Natasha in screaming to anyone who’ll listen that having a million EEs all designing their own symbols & footprints – everyone reinventing the wheel a million times over – is a complete effing absurdity and monumental waste of time and human talent. I’m shocked that dozens of MBAs in companies with EEs haven’t figured this out yet and held the components/EDA industry to ransom for creating such gross externalities for the rest of the components-buying industry! It’s unbelievable to me that component manufacturer execs needs this sh*t explained to them by an outsider like Natasha, all the while the market for consumers of EE components having diversified enormously over the decades, where you’d think these execs would realise they need a better way to support more than the upper crust of companies lucky enough to have internal librarians (and FAEs on tap).

   I sat through the last few years of Altium’s shirtful one step forward two steps back process of (a) getting Altium moved to a modern 64bit app platform (& was an extremely vocal critic of how they left some significant proportion of their customers out to dry with utterly debilitating bugs in v18 & v19, even contemplating jumping ship to KiCad!), & (b) getting component sourcing data and library (symbol/footprint/etc) data integrated into Altium, and I have to say, although it’s been a long and windy road, and it’s still buggy, especially their ActiveBoM, I think they’re almost there with the latest Altium 365 that’s now part of the famously expensive annual maintenance fee. I’ve taken my finger off the trigger 😉

   I installed the SnapEDA plugin to Altium recently, and will try it some more, but honestly based on past experience, I’m not holding my breath 🙁