How do you design these days?

What is the difference between a buffalo and a bison?

You can't wash your hands in a buffalo.

;-)

-- "Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it." (Stephen Leacock)

Because you'll be doing it all?

YECCH!

-- "Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it." (Stephen Leacock)

Managers fix blame. Engineers fix the problem.

-- "Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it." (Stephen Leacock)

Like "What's the difference between a Stoic and a Cynic?

Da stoic is what brings da baby, and da cynic is what you washes it in.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I use express PCB and get protype boards for less than $100. The time savings is worth it.

You can also make some miniboards from this stuff.

Also, you can bend all the pins up to achieve a living bug. Usually, and only once. I often take a snippet of thin wood, glue that down, glue the chip onto that and then solder all the pins that need GND to the copper. This avoids any pin bending. With wood it's still possible to swap the chip when you have fried it, not so easy with plastics. Plus gives me a wonderful excuse to eat a Haagen-Dasz bar with almond crunch on top :-)

Yup. The only thing I hate with copper clad is all the ugly fingerprints after hours of experimenting.

It is. However, the $30 for an over-priced board are really down in the noise for my kind of projects.

Wish we had such flea markets up here near Sacramento. But it's mostly a city of bureaucrats :-(

Well, if Harborfreight had them for cheap ...

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Perhaps. But if the survivors are sufficiently nervous of getting fired that they triple-check every aspect of the circuit before they commit to a printed circuit layout, you may find that you get to the final layout more slowly than you would have if you'd gone through a throw-away prototype layout along the way.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Xactly

Old Chinese saying: "Man who says it cannot be done should not interrupt man doing it" :-)

:-)

-- "Electricity is of two kinds, positive and negative. The difference is, I presume, that one comes a little more expensive, but is more durable; the other is a cheaper thing, but the moths get into it." (Stephen Leacock)

No, but, more seriously, there is some correlation between creativity/intelligence and a kind of disinterest in actually implementing all of the boring details with precision (and probably also ability to be managed, but that another story), so you have to be careful. *Unfounded* optimism is fatal too- one has to be particularly suspicious of data sheet claims and what evils they may be hiding behind their happy headlines. And suspicous of boring stuff such as the accuracy and applicability of stock layout libraries.

If one really cares about getting things right, one can work around personality by devising checklists and such like that cover off checking for problems that have occurred in the past-- Kaizen.

And don't hire people who think it takes three board spins to get rid of most of the fly wires.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

One of these days I'm going to have a board house gold-plate a bunch of FR4 scraps. Boy would you guys have breadboard envy!

John

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Even better is to have the survivors enjoy their work and their lives, and do good work because they like to. Getting it right, and beautiful, becomes a team sport.

There's no limit to how many throw-away prototypes you can do, at least until the project is cancelled.

John

Your customers already know your stuff is gold-plated. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I couldn't care less.

John

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I generally make a PCB at home, it only takes an hour or so. If a home- made PCB isn't suitable I use PCBTrain's 24 hour service, it only costs =A330.

Leon

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I'm going through this right now. New (208 pin!) microcontroller, ADC, connectors, SMPS chip. I can spend an extra couple of days re-checking everything, and I just *know* I will still miss a couple of things. Or I can just go ahead and make the damn board.

I think I'll just go ahead and see how it turns out. At some point it's actually quicker and cheaper to debug using the real thing.