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- Happy Halloween! Has anyone heard of people giving away circuits as a Halloween?
- Did you know: CR2032 batteries reference the size of the battery? Chris didn’t!
- The BeagleBoard folks just released the BeagleBone! It looks great! Also, kudos to the folks at TI, especially those on the team.
- Dave has a deposit in on the new place!
- CadSoft is releasing EAGLE 6 soon! It will now use XML data.
- Chris is working on KiCAD tutorials right now:
- Download KiCAD for Windows, Mac or Linux.
- The XML data on EAGLE 6 will help with diff-ing files. EMSL has a great article on the usefulness of visual diffs.
- If people know of a good system for FPGA project revision control, please let us know.
- Dave is a judge for the Dangerous Prototypes 7400 Contest! Lots of great entries so far!
- The IEEE sent out a note to their email alert recipients about the less-than-desirable title for a recent email:
Please accept our sincere apologies for the headline in today's Tech Alert: "With the Arduino, Now Even Your Mom Can Program." The actual title of the article is "The Making of Arduino." I'm an IEEE member, and a mom, and the headline was inexcusable, a lazy, sexist cliché that should have never seen the light of day. Today we are instituting an additional headline review process that will apply to all future Tech Alerts so that such insipid and offensive headlines never find their way into your in-box.
- In brighter and awesomer news, The White House has a video encouraging young female scientists and engineers to “Start Breaking Stuff!“. Great advice!
- India has waaaaay more schools than they need for engineering students.
- Robots are getting creepier and are now walking upright. The petman robot from Boston Dynamics…one step closer to the Terminator!
- Reminds Dave of one of the robots from his childhood favorite show The Thunderbirds.
- Robots are also useful, like the agrarobots in this recent hackaday post.
- They’re also a career opportunity as more and more jobs are taken over by robots.
- Silicon Valley is looking for software talent as well, even outside of those with degrees. Learn on the job, right? Perhaps going from high school to “the pros” is a good way to entice engineering extracurriculars in school?
- Or perhaps SV should adopt a model more like Germany’s apprentice system and co-develop curriculum with schools.
Use GIT dave! It can save your arse one day.
Regarding open source pcb software, what do you think of this blog post.
http://www.suspectdevices.com/blahg/electronics/the-other-open-source-its-the-meta-data-stupid/
Open-source may not be ‘open’ enough in some cases.
Re. version control, I’m with Dave, as most of my proijects are simple. I have some neat softeare called versionbackup which backs up all changes in dev folders every day and keeps all changes for the last month, so when I break something I have every day’s previous version available.
http://www.versionbackup.sb-aw.com/
Self-taught and/or Arduino? Some moment in the future, when you enter an elevator you will pray that the control software wasn’t done by your mom or a some self-taught guy using an Arduino.
Regarding version control. These days I refuse to work with people who don’t do version control. I have just seen too many things go wrong over the years. The threshold in number of team members when to start version control is one.
You think, if someone has a PhD, they don’t make mistakes?
I think that self-taught gits, Arduino artists or my mom should not be let near some critical hardware or software. But it looks pretty much that this will be the future. Self-taught gits with Arduinos in their hands passing off as embedded engineers.
But thanks for volunteering to test the first arduino driven elevator once it becomes available.
Many professionals in the field of embedded software, and such, are in fact, self-taught. And they often have much more experience and knowledge than guys with PhD.
PhD != Lots of experience & smart.
Self-taught != “I know how to blink an LED” type.
No one will let those Arduino artists near such a critical things like an elevator control software.
And in fact if someone would build an Arduino-based elevator – I would never use that thing. I’m not crazy enough for that 🙂
There is also Mercurial
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercurial
I have used eagle for years and once you do learn it, it is fine. I am curious to try KiCAD as well, but the time I have invested into part libraries in Eagle makes it difficult to start over. If the Eagle library importing capability is true and can import libraries with out issue, it would definitely be worth taking a look at.
The 7400 series contest was way too broad as you mentioned. I have plenty of old projects I could have entered including entire 7400 based computers, but it really isn’t quite fair to enter a project that I put over a year of time into. Hopefully others are not entering old projects as well. The time constraints keep it somewhat fair.
Making library parts in KiCad is a lot less of a pain than in Eagle, for what it’s worth.
I’ve contacted the CadSoft folks for an updated response but this is the clarification from the last time there was confusion about the free version of EAGLE:
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2011/04/26/freeware-version-of-eagle-is-still-free-dont-worry/
Cheers,
Drew
I just received this response from CadSoft:
“We will keep the Freeware and we will also give our EAGLE users the chance to take part at the beta testing, which will be available soon. The appropriate file will be downloadable from the CS website. We will also post a message in the forums once the beta-version is available.”
I just received this response from CadSoft:
“We will keep the Freeware and we will also give our EAGLE users the chance to take part at the beta testing, which will be available soon. The appropriate file will be downloadable from the CS website. We will also post a message in the forums once the beta-version is available.”
Did you guys mention a PIC contest in the works? Any links? Thanks!
I hate Eagle every day for the library building, KiCAD is awsome at it. And the KiCad is pretty awsome, but its still too rough. Like, you can’t assign half of the commands to shortcut keys and so on. I wanted to throw money at them so they would do it faster, but unfortunately they don’t have donate button. So, more pressure and money at KiCad programmers.
Just wondering if either Dave or Chris have thoroughly tested Designspark PCB, or are planning to? It’s rarely mentioned when you’re discussing cad software. I have great experience with it and have successfully created a couple of PCBs ordered professionally with it. I’m not an advanced user, so I don’t know what advanced features might be lacking. And regarding open source hardware, I think the function “export PCB 3D model to google sketchup” feature is awesome.
I’ve only toyed around with it, but it seems like another good option, especially in the hobbyist realm.
Hey Dave, don’t number the little videos, just put them in a separate playlist on You tube. (call it something cool)
Sadly my college teaches MATLAB first before any other programming language to engineers of all kinds (ECE, Biomedical and Mech).
Regarding the “mom” comment by the IEEE, I was offended, but not really surprised. I’m a first year EE student and I’m not sure if it’s localized to my university, but often the sexism is rampant. I don’t think the comment was meant maliciously but it is reflective of pervasive undertones in the community.
Hopefully, the environment for women in engineering will continue to evolve closer to a “gender blind” environment.
The scathing retraction from IEEE probably brought way more attention to the original e-mail. They could use that if they ever want to be sure people see an article.
Thanks for the show.