Anyone using "Fritzing" ?? ...Jim Thompson
-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at
I'm looking for work... see my website.
I'm not allowed to. It's "for non-engineers."
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Pencil and Engineering paper rules!
Cheers
Strange. John Larkin must think that he is an engineer.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Yes. I draw schematics on D-size vellum with a Berol Turquoise F pencil. It gets me out of my chair, away from a screen for a while. I have a guy who enters my designs into PADS and lays out the board.
I did this all by myself recently, for a number of reasons, partly to learn the new PADS.
But schematic entry on a screen is tedious; drawing is fun.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Anything with a white nylon 'breadboard' is an abomination. I haven't used one of those since I was a teenager, though I've held my nose and helped other people who were doing it. (They'll probably learn eventually, if they build anything complicated enough to be nontrivial to debug.)
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
I worked for a while with a guy in Alameda, service work for ships. He did a couple of controllers for shipboard steam turbines using the white things, and glued them inside engine room consoles. I didn't keep that job for long.
I did design a digital synchroscope for him, but a lot of other people did too.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc picosecond timing precision measurement jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com http://www.highlandtechnology.com
Gack... no.
I admit I still have a small protoboard around somewhere though. Tried it once, got pissed at the crappy connections, put it in a drawer, haven't seen it since.
Mark L. Fergerson
I used them for _one_ project in college. I kept burning my fingers on '709s as they lost contact with their compensation networks. The prof I was working with was getting pissed because I kept burning up expensive opamps, until he did it.
Usenet's collapse predated the Arduino.
Just another layer of CAD....
CAD programs weren't originally designed with their targeted users in mind, hence the learning curve, knowledgeable or not, from paper to keyboard.
RL
Potential customer of a client of mine... needing applications assistance... handed off to me >:-} ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| San Tan Valley, AZ 85142 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I'm looking for work... see my website.
Fritzing is basically a method of doing breadboards using the worst possible breadboard possible (stripboard), and then morphing the resulting mess into a PCB. The resultant hardware, software, PCB, and designs are expected to open sourced to the multitudes. Ummm... no thanks.
Got any static sensitive parts? This should blow them up nicely:
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Fritzing seems to be all about building breadboards before committing to a PCB. Since you don't do breadboards and go directly from the design to the PCB, you probably don't need fritzing. Besides, I don't think any of your designs will work on a "stripboard". My RF stuff certainly won't.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Most of the projects shown on the Fritzing web site seem to not get beyond the plastic protoboard stage.
I breadboard on copperclad FR4, or lay out a multilayer board for complex stuff.
You can do 100 ps/3GHz stuff this way, or maybe faster.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Anything that gets kids interested in real electronics is good, even if it teaches them some bad habits.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Agreed, but I'm a bit old skool and prefer to show kids how to use a soldering iron, how to make dead bug prototypes, and why stripboards and solderless breadboards suck. The problem with these is that they promote all kinds of bad habits and construction errors. In my never humble opinion, stripboards and solderless breadboards are dead ends.
OfF the top of my cranium:
I've had to deal with two former techs, that learned to breadboard everything on stripboards and solderless breadboards. It took me a while to prove to them that RF circuits on stripboards were impossible, and that there was little difference in time spent on stripboard, versus various other PCB based breadboard methods. I haven't helped get kids started in electronics for a long time, but I suspect that an early intro to SMT parts and soldering might be more useful than a solderless breadboard based dead end.
Incidentally, I got a phone call from a local college student with a problem. He had been designing and modeling various digital and analog circuits on a computah for a few years. He never bothered to learn how to stuff a PCB or hand solder because he had his friends available to do it for him. It was now a skool vacation and all his friends were elsewhere. I ended up doing the stuffing and soldering for him (for free). He seemed to believe that such activities were beneath the dignity of the designer. I guess we may be producing a generation of electronic engineers where fritzing is the best that they can do, and who really don't know which end of the soldering iron to grab.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
Without seeing an example, I will dare say... I can prove you wrong by building your "impossible" circuits. ;-)
Hey, I originally developed circuits like this on solderless breadboard,
Mostly, all the crap you see on the scope probe, is an artifact of the scope probe itself. Or, more accurately, of the common mode voltage the breadboard is throwing off, that the circuit itself doesn't see because it's a voltage that's not dropping across the circuit.
That one time I did a 500kHz, 100W resonant converter on solderless breadboard was interesting. The 24AWG jumpers didn't want to stay in the sockets, on account of their getting too hot from the reactive current. Still worked fine though.
Tim
-- Seven Transistor Labs, LLC Electrical Engineering Consultation and Contract Design Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com
You can get prototyping board with a "collander" ground plane on the compon ent side. It's a pretty effective ground plane, through not as nice as a bu ried ground plane in a multilayer board.
You can consider it, but doing much about it can be difficult.
That's a general problem, even with soldered prototypes. Anything put toget her by a wire-man on any kind of prototyping board is a whole lot less reli able than something built as a printed circuit board. Solder-free boards ar e even worse, of course.
Not strictly true. I've cut ring pads on prototyping board into segments, a nd soldered some of the pins on SMD devices to individual segments, and use d lengths of wire to hook up the rest - no adapter.
Not a good idea, but temptation is there to be resisted.
Can be.
They can be awkward on a printed circuit board too.
Digital buses are messy on printed circuit board too, if not quite as messy .
There have always been people like that. Some of them don't know it, and wa ste time and effort putting together snarled up hardware that can never be made to work. If you can't actually use your hands effectively, it's comfor ting to think that what you can't do is beneath your dignity. John Larkin h as a similar attitude to numerical design.
There have always been all-thumbs people around. I don't think that this ge neration includes a higher proportion of them.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
I might have to scan some photographs, but I think I can find some examples. I have photos of some rather messy breadboards that worked nicely.
Most of what I do is RF. RF begins where signals prefer to radiate instead of conduct. The rule of thumb is "wires radiate, components do not radiate". The solderless breadboards are nothing but radiating wires at RF frequencies.
Also, if done some damage control on RF designs that were reasonably well calculated, with decent components, but which didn't work as expected when crammed into a tiny enclosure. The usual problem was a general failure to keep the signal path from crossing over itself, resulting in an unwanted feedback loop, which is very much like a stripboard, with it's crossed traces on opposite sides of the PCB.
What frequency does the switcher run? You could probably get away with a solderless breadboard at 1Mhz switching, with harmonics to about maybe 3MHz. Anything higher than maybe about 7MHz and the parallel capacitance between "wires" in the solderless breadboard might cause problems. Fortunately, your circuit avoids high impedances, so it probably would work without coupling problems.
Sure, at maybe 1MHz. However, at higher frequencies, the long power bus wires of the solderless breadboard begin to look like inductors, which will have voltages impressed across the bus sections if there's any current flowing through the bus.
Sigh. This sounds like you're stretching the limits of what can be done on a solderless breadboard. Melting the plastic is not what I would consider "working fine". Also, I suspect you could have built the circuit using a 3D rats nest of wires and components held together on a piece of PCB material, in less time, and with better results than a solderless breadboard.
Messy solderless breadboards:
From a Bob Pease book cover:
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I have a trick question that helps identify those that lack mechanical aptitude. I ask "Do you fix your own car?" or something similar. Most who are mechanically inclined do some of their own repairs primarily because it saves money. My question is not a perfect method because there are significant difference in people that can deal with big things and those who can deal with tiny things. The skills are very much independent of each other.
In this case, I asked the student about his vehicle. He does as much self maintenance on his automobile as possible. Same with his bicycle and his parents sailboat. In other words, he's not mechanically deficient and probably qualified to stuff and solder his own boards. My guess(tm) is he somehow decided that it was demeaning of his lofty position as an engineer to get his hands dirty. In some cultures, it's quite common for the upper classes to have such an attitude. At one company where I once worked, the theoretical basis for the company's major product was contrived by a designer from India. He could not solder, build a prototype, or even carry his own papers. He had assistants and a servant to do all that for him. He did what he new best, which was communications theory.
One problem with learning to solder and build things, is that it has to be done at an early age. I worked with a programmer that provided a good example why this is important. He was the son of an auto mechanic, who decided that his son would not also become an auto mechanic. Every time the son would pick up a tool, his father would take it from him. He had near zero childhood experience with tools. The result was in later years, he was completely useless using any type of hand tool. Up until that time, I had assumed that man is born with the ability to use tools. Apparently not, as it does require early practice to become proficient.
Again, if we're going to teach kids something about electronics, which I assume means building something, it should be with tools that teach manual dexterity, construction techniques, use of tools, and maybe a little circuit theory. Poking parts into holes just doesn't strike me as much of a challenge or learning experience.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
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