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#88 – Yonderly Yodeling Yobbos

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Thanks to Tapir Girl for the yodeling picture

Comments

  2. And soon you realize that you’ll need allmost all stuff on *both* locations. So soon you’ll have all the same equipment on your lab and your carage.

  3. I cart a large backback to and from work including personal tools, usb flash drives, projects, components and other packages i’ve had delivered to work and want to take home. Sometimes work projects I want to do some work on over the weekend or home projects I bring in to work to use work tools on.It’s not quite a bag of holding but it feels like it. From time to time I have to empty it out to rediscover the things that got jostled to the bottom of the bag.
    ———————————————–
    That reed switch manufacturing video is epic. I won’t say I’ll stop complaining about the price of reeds but i’ll appreciate it better.
    ———————————————–
    Love these asian electronics markets videos. I watch them and wonder what the rent is like nearby or above these markets. I wonder if theyre still open at midnight?
    ———————————————–

  4. Re.parts libraries, as mentioned there is no universal answer, and packages that quote huge libs typically do so by listing every minor part number variant of the same part as a seperate item.
    Therefore an absolutely essential characteristic of any PCB tool is that it is very quick and easy to create parts,both from scratch and as modified versions of existing ones.

  5. You know… about the missing-parts-in-library issue, I’ve been pondering the notion of making some software to auto-generate schematic symbols from datasheet PDFs. I’ve been looking into libraries for reading PDF files and pondering heuristics to interpret pin tables and diagrams. It looks doable to me, but maybe I’m in lala-land as Dave calls it?

    • There is such tool for KiCad library components. It’s on page http://kicad.rohrbacher.net/quicklib.php

      And I would like to see that github/whatever crowd sourced KiCad library. We have such library for Eagle in our lab that we maintain over Dropbox and it is quite useful.

      For managing and reorganizing KiCad libraries and footprints, I used text editor. But as I grew tired of it I wrote piece of python to do simpler tasks for me, already mentioned on here: http://jaanus.tech-thing.org/everything-thats-not-hardware/tech-thing-kicad-library-manager/
      But really, the KiCad’s own library/module browser is very good, it just lacks the ability to rename/move/delete parts. It someone would add those, using it would be another x% better.

      • That’s a somewhat useful tool… but um… I’m talking about an entirely different concept altogether: Generating symbols for a specific part from the datasheet, including proper pin names, heuristics to guess pin-type, list of allowed footprints, and perhaps heuristics to organize the symbol by things besides pin order.

      • Oh, and yeah, I do agree that the library browser is annoying in that way.

        Nice tool you made for that 🙂

  7. I work for that company founded by Bill and Dave
    Its half way through the financial year and they’re starting to watch the expenses.
    Any expense less than $1000 ( I can’t even order a note pad) have to be signed off by a regional manager. I bet his time to sign this is worth more than the notebook I’m trying to buy
    And they call this cost control?

  8. May seem like a stupid question but why do the chip manufactures not provide a schematic and a footprint for their components? They provide a data sheet and presumably expect people to use the part so why make life difficult for the customer? I know that there isn’t a generic format for these things but that begs the question why not? Look what pdf’s did for documents. It only takes a little willingness and cooperation by the manufactures to come up with a standard data format then each and every package for eagle to Altium could convert them to there own format if need be. Just look at the Hammond case Dave uses in his pcb project, they have a 3d animated cad file you can download into your cad package Bang! Just HOW many units has this sold for them? Probably tens of thousands or more.

    • – Not enough pressure from the market to do it
      – Cost
      – Liability
      – Fear to help the competition
      – Lack of clue

      • 1) Not enough pressure from the market to do it.
        True. Apathy reigns supreme!
        2) Cost
        Minimal. They produce data sheets the extra work is tiny.
        3)Liability
        If they cannot produce accurate and tested data then no one can. Besides they can always hide behind the same get outs they use in data sheets.
        4)Fear to help the competition
        I don’t see how producing footprints for their products will help a competitor any more than producing a data sheet does
        5)Lack of clue
        Now you’ve got it!! 😉

  9. Regarding the footprints.

    I noticed that Eagle has text (human readable) files and I gather so does KiCADs I thought the guys mentioned it in the show. Wouldn’t it be possible to write a translator to convert between the two formats?

    In mechanical CAD the first ~ standard I recall is the AutoCAD dxf format. This was just a text version of the autoCAD file format and it was fairly easy to understand using the reference book. I think it reached critical mass due to AutoCAD being distributed in the schools and frankly also due to pirating of it.

    Maybe there so far has not been a product reaching critical mass to dominate and force other packages into conformance. Could the DIY community provide this?

    I am new to Eagle and EE in general. I don’t mind making schematics in eagle but as a mechanical guy I find the footprint drawing tool really horrible. Actually the drawings on the datasheet aren’t too hot either.

    so I guess my point is that we need a paradigm shift greater than just building big part libraries in one package or another.

    • There is a script for eagle that converts eagle libraries to dirty KiCad libraries. And I think I saw a script somewhere that did the opposite too.

  10. 2) Cost
    Minimal. They produce data sheets the extra work is tiny.

    Oh no. Large companies have a knack to make such things super costly. Lots of meetings, committees, insanely expensive software tools, founding a new department with at least two levels of management. And don’t forget the corporate lawyers, because

    3)Liability
    If they cannot produce accurate and tested data then no one can.

    The corporate lawyers will make this a big thing. Reminding management of the possibility of multi-million damages and lawsuits ahead when giving out data directly intended to be used for production.

    4)Fear to help the competition
    I don’t see how producing footprints for their products will help a competitor any more than producing a data sheet does

    Thing jelly-bean parts. Once a company had made it super expensive for themselves to produce the information they don’t want to see a competitor using it and replacing the component name only.