The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast

A weekly show about the trends in the electronic industry.

You are here: Home / Radio Show / #49 – Analog Devices, Design Spark – Unusual Usenet Usurpation

#49 – Analog Devices, Design Spark – Unusual Usenet Usurpation

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS

This week focused more on electronics! Think we talk about something too much or too little? Let us know in the comments!

    • Chris finally got a chair and wowsa does it make a difference!

That’s all for this week. Be sure to leave us some comments and find us on Twitter or Facebook!

 

Comments

  2. Hi,

    I think the largest (in complexity) open source hardware is the USRP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Software_Radio_Peripheral)
    You can just buy the base-board and make the rx/tx boards and antennas yourself easily. It maybe not is the project you were looking for (in many ppl using it) but some huge thing nevertheless. I mean its a damn cool thing: I saw some guys receiving GSM signals with it an hour later they were transmitting a TV signal.

  3. Dave, have you looked at DipTrace as an alternative EDA package? I’ve been using it for a month and I find it pretty well rounded. Great user interface too, works on windows, give it a look.

    It’s got schematic capture, PCB layout, package and component editors. It’s not high-end but it’s way better then Eagle in my opinion. You may well need something more powerful but I’d say it’s got everything the advanced hobbyist / postgrad student needs.

    DipTrace has a free full functionality 30 day demo. Highly recommended.

    • Thanks for the tip on DipTrace.

      I find it very intuitive and the commercial pricing is reasonable.

      I was able to duplicate from scratch in one night what had taken me days to do in Eagle. I know that Eagle can do a lot, but sure doesn’t have an intuitive interface.

      Glad I read this before plopping down the $1400 for Eagle!

      Thanks again for the tip.

  6. Amazon doesn’t really ship things besides books/cd/kindle to Canada even, and we’re right beside the US even…

    About CAD packages for OSHW projects, I don’t think it matters much personally. Most derivative designs I see redo the PCB from scratch anyway. About avoiding Eagle, from what I’ve seen Kicad has looked to be the next most popular for OSHW stuff. I think the guy that does the Dorkbot PDX PCB order (@laen on Twitter) has commented that he gets a lot of kicad designed orders these days.

  7. I’m an avid user of KiCAD.

    It still has its quirks, but there is non of this wretched ‘but you can only make 2 layer boards up to 100x80mm’ business 😉

    3 successful projects so far, no terminal failures . Personally I strongly miss curved traces (splines) and an easy way to add thermal vias to components and filled zones. The integrated gerber viewer still can’t compete with ‘gerbv’ as far as visual quality is concerned. On Windoze you’d use something like GC-Prevue.

    But it’s free!

  8. Dave, regarding the price of DipTrace, if you contact their sales people and bat your eyelashes a bit they’ll drop the price a bit. I got a juicy discount on the full package a few days ago, their sales and tech support people are pretty helpful actually.

    • If you do a Video tutorial on it I’m sure they will offer you favourable terms. Have to agree that Diptrace seems to have a much more intuitive interface than eagle. I’m sure that you will have no problems with either but I found Diptrace much easier to get started with than other packages I tried.

  10. EDA package: If you buy into the ideology and aren’t just an armchair OHW guy then it must be an open source EDA package. And there aren’t too many of them, and they aren’t great. And it must run on Linux.

    If you are just an armchair OHW guy then do what the whole armchair OHW industry does, use Eagle.

  11. As for large open design hardware projects you might consider HDSPR (http://openhpsdr.org/) which I just now stumbled upon. It seems to meet by your criteria since there a fair number of designers and it is fairly large if you consider all the different modules.

  12. And in regards to Eagle, I’ve been using it since 1996 (version 3.55) so it has been around significantly longer than the 15 year guess assuming the version numbers mean anything.
    As well, I was quite surprised when I received an offer to upgrade from Newark which did not list the free version as being available (don’t have the letter in front of me right now), there was a try before-you-buy option instead, it seemed.

  13. I liked the HDSPR link above. Also, check out:

    http://www.scottyspectrumanalyzer.com/

    here’s an open design 1GHz spectrum analyzer, based on little RF modules. There’s an active yahoo-group-based community. There are only a few real contributing developers, but people have been sharing designs for resonators, filters, etc.; one guy has been working on a USB-based control module. Another guy has written the UI software, calibration software, tutorials, etc.

  15. I’ve made 2 small boards with kicad. I like it but it isn’t exactly polished. Dave will probably be yelling fail constantly but it might give him a good source for new videos.

    The ubertooth (http://ubertooth.sourceforge.net/) is a cool open hardware project but that may not have been designed by enough people to meet the standards. Also, the open graphics project (http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php) was a neat open source hardware idea but it appears to be dead.

  16. I’m a consultant and freelance EE. I use GEDA for everything. I find it quite nice. PCB will import schematics, so you no longer need any command line crap. I love it– I’ve used Pads and Eagle in the past, and I’m much happier now.

  18. I vote for Kicad, it works for win + lin as well. Open source projects? Look at the ham world eg: scottyspecan for just one example. I’m happier with less yank bashing, it gets old quickly. Robots? 1. Read “Player Piano”. 2. There’s a Kimberley mining company driving those huge dump trucks from Adelaide. The show was good guys!

  19. I think you should try KiCad Dave. It’s not polished but still a great option for hobbyist.

    It would be nice if you would try some commercial programs with reasonable prices and give us your opinion.

  20. Altium doesn’t support exporting to IDF, so unfortunately checking it out with Google SketchUp would be a no-go!

  21. Do pick and place machines only place the components on the board, or does it also solder it?

    I’m guessing there is one machine to place the solder paste, then another machine to pick and place the component onto the paste, and then a 3rd machine to actually heat the board. If that’s the case, even if a cheap pick and place machine were available today, it’s still a ways from assembling boards at home!

    • Max: Yep, you guessed right. Solder paste is typically applied in production runs with a stencil machine (although check out Dave’s EEVBlog video of that machine used for prototypes/smaller production runs that adds solder to pads individually from a syringe), then comes pick and place/chip shooter/some other component placement, then through a reflow oven.

  22. Hi Dave! Sometimes I have to look for parts, like LDOs or battery charger ICs, and I’ve also realize Digikey parametric search isn’t enough.
    Can you share your strategy about finding all available parts and manufacturers?
    Do you gather all information in a single worksheet and then make your search regarding specific parameters you can’t find in Digikey?
    Recently, I was searching for a Li-ion charger/manager but I couldn’t get the quiescent current from Digikey parameters.

  24. Hi,
    I’m using DesignSpark PCB 3, and love it so far. Now I’m able to call LTspice directly from DS3. Simulate my circuits *.cir then make my PCB easily using “Translate to PCB”.

    I can use SparkFun & Adafruit Industries Eagle lib.