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This is not to say embedded software doesn’t have its own challenges (IT DOES), but at least that C function I wrote to convert twos-complement to decimal floats will still work if I try to use it on another project. It’s even more fun if the mistake is related to a part I’ve used successfully before ?.
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See, the fun thing about hardware is that when I make a mistake, I find out after a week or two of sitting on my hands and hundreds/thousands of dollars in parts and manufacturing costs.
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In the best case that’s just kind of annoying, but sometimes it can really mess things up. Even if I’ve used the part before, I still have to consult the datasheet for every little detail (where’s that resistor table that sets the current limit again?). An LDO and a couple of capacitors isn’t so bad to redo, but battery chargers and fuel gauges have a lot more supporting circuitry. Even if I had bothered to create lovely nice project templates to get Altium (my preferred PCB CAD software) set up, I find that I’m building a lot of the same circuits from scratch every time. While the prospect of building new designs is really exciting, the reality is clunky. Well I love developing hardware so, good! Mostly. This means I’m doing a lot more new electrical designs, rather than iterating (obsessing?) over one or two. In the last couple of years alone I’ve had maybe 4-5 different projects instead of just one. Since shifting to more contracting, I’ve worked on a host of other budding startup products that are on their way to the market in one way or another. I’ve worked on infrared imaging systems, robots that manage(d) solar farms, energy monitoring systems, and designed this COPD-monitoring medical device (currently in production): I’m an electrical engineer who, through no fault of my own, ended up specializing in embedded system design. I develop an approach to shift between debug and production versions of circuit boards without introducing new errors, and use it to make a new IoT device.
#CIRCUIT DESIGN SOFTWARE WITHOUT PCB CODE#
I try out a new way of writing code to design circuit boards. TL DR This post describes my project to knock some of the risk out of circuit board design.