#505 – Hardware Revision Control with Kyle Dumont

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Welcome, Kyle Dumont of Allspice!

• Kyle has a background in EE and worked at iRobot.
• After that he worked at Voxel8 on the Developer’s Kit, the 3D printer that could do plastics plus circuits. You may remember a quadcopter that could fly off of the print bed.
• Using a high end milling machine, they could get 100 micron trace/space. They did this by milling out the channel and filling with silver.
• Things went quiet on the circuits front, so Voxel8 moved into rapidly printed footwear. Things like “stylized uppers”
• First printer launched was called the developers kits and was good for doing things like 3D antennas and getting blind vias for free.
• Kyle recently graduated from the new MS/MBA program at Harvard.
• He mostly took CS / Datascience classes on the technical front, because of the availability of graduate level classes. So no exposure to Horowitz or Hill, unfortunately.
• Kyle started Allspice with his classmate Valentina, as a way to make hardware design more like software.
• Building a git release for hardware designs, instead of relying on zip files. This took direct cues from his experience doing product development.
• Processes are built around the waterfall development process
• When starting the EE team at Voxel, they used GitHub
• What would you tell a new hire for using Git?
• These days, younger EEs do firmware anyway.
• How does git work?
• Git allows design revision control
• Different than Subversion, another revision control method used by Altium.
• Git holds the entire history, and only tracks the incremental changes.
• Separation between local and remote.
• Jesse Vincent’s talk at KiCon about tooling for manufacturing files
• Using Continuous Integration
• Simulation is usually super targeted, trying to get 4th order accuracy
• Atul Gowande Checklist Manifesto
• Tying footprints to MPN
• Initial focus was on teams using git with hardware designs
• Building visual red-lines, so that you can see what has changed during a design review.
• Kyle can name the likelihood of a CAD program based on industry!
• Altium building Altium365
• Explaining how a change ripples out
• Users of Git and Allspice will learn to break changes up into the most digestible changes
• JEDEC30 format
• Component information
• Pull request is analogous to the ECO process
• “Can this be done” vs “Should this be done”
• Unit testing
• How would this work with PCB manufacturing?
• Tagging to put a version on a board. Chris used to put commit numbers on PCBs.
• Check out Allspice for more info, or email Kyle directly