
An engineer's emergency kit business card - amirmc
http://boldport.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/an-engineers-emergency-kit-business-card.html
======
asb
For those not familiar with Saar/Boldport's work, he's working on PCBmodE
([https://bitbucket.org/boldport/pcbmode](https://bitbucket.org/boldport/pcbmode),
used to create this business card PCB), an open source layout tool borne out
of frustration with the existing tools widely used by the industry.

The most impressive board designed using PCBmodE so far in my opinion is
Saar's 'lifegame' [http://boldport.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-
lifegame.html](http://boldport.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-lifegame.html)

------
pg
Is it the default now for individual entries on blogger.com blogs to be
displayed as lightboxes, or is this just an unusual option this one user
chose?

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Just try reading it on an iPad. It's an absolutely miserable experience. It
feels like they tried to reimplement scrolling, which, of course, they get
totally wrong.

It baffles me that companies spend significant amounts of time and resources
making a user experience that _works great_ rather awful[1].

[1] See also: Flickr.

~~~
MarkSweep
Oddly they are continuing to make it worse. For at least a year you have
needed JavaScript enabled to view Blogger sites. It's a blog, why do you need
JavaScript to display a loading screen! And they scroll horribly in mobile
Safari too.

And now these light boxes. I don't get it.

Related to the BoldPort product though, I think electrical engineering world
is world could use some better tools. Earlier in the week one of our
electrical engineers spent a day helping to debug a new board. The problem
ended up being a signal name was renamed in one place but not another. If the
current EE design tools don't have refactoring support much less some sort of
electrical "uninitialized variable" error, there must be room for improvement
in these tools.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
I can't respond to the article itself, since I can't read it, since I refuse
to turn on JavaScript for random web sites. BTW HN itself works great without
JavaScript.

To your point about "uninitialized variable" nets, if the net was truly a
singleton it would show up as such in a netlist report. This capability
existed in board design tools I used 30 years ago. What might have happened is
a renamed net might have been split into two different nets. E.g. a net that
connected 10 places became two nets, one to 8 places, another to 2 places. Not
a singleton.

There are additional checks that netlist generation tools can do. E.g. does
every net have a "driver" or "output" on it, or does it consist of all
"inputs". Absence of driver can easily be flagged as an error. However, there
is one wrinkle. Sometimes, nets are "busses" and are bidirectional. Each pin
of the net can be either an input or an output at various times. That's harder
to detect as an error.

There are many ways to avoid problems like this. Two common ones: 1) READ THE
LOGS. I'd bet even money that your problem shows up in the logs as a singleton
net or as a net without a driver. 2) SIMULATE. Board functional simulation has
been possible for over 30 years; it's not always done. Did your engineer
simulate his design? Why didn't his simulation catch the problem?

Sometimes, in board design (as in FPGA design) it's faster and certainly
easier to just get 99% of the way there ahead of time and debug the final few
errors on the board itself. That might be the case here, so if your company
made this decision a priori, then you shouldn't be surprised if you need to
spend some time debugging a few simple errors.

BTW that sort of sloppiness just wouldn't fly in chip design. Chips are
usually far far far too complicated; extensive pre-tapeout simulation is de
rigueur. And it takes weeks (if you have much money and a very good
relationship with a fab) or months to get revised silicon. Much easier to do a
few cuts and jumpers to a board than to do a silicon spin.

As to "refactoring support", most CAD systems I was familiar with didn't have
an easy way to rename a net across multiple "pages" of a board design. Maybe
the tools have gotten better. IMO that sort of refactoring (if done
extensively) is a losing proposition anyway. You're much better off with
careful attention to detail up front. You should be very careful renaming nets
that cross schematic pages; you wouldn't have the problem if you carefully
thought about the names before you created the schematic.

In summary, even the best tools won't help a sloppy designer.

~~~
boldport
Author of article. Someone posted a static version of the page:

    
    
      http://ajasmin.net/saved_page/an-engineers-emergency-kit-business-card.html
    

I hope you like it.

> In summary, even the best tools won't help a sloppy designer.

Sloppy engineering is bad. But excusing shitty EDA tools by suggesting the
engineer is sloppy is not much better. Most EDA tools are crap at DRC (static
rules that only cover geometry and physical connections) and user experience.
(Most engineers wouldn't have access to very expensive tools that might be
better than some.) You talk about FPGAs (I'm an FPGA/Verilog expert); have you
ever looked at the logs? It's getting progressively better, but wading through
hundreds and thousands of warning and info messages is not exactly the most
effective way to tell an engineer that something _might_ be wrong. Sure, you
can write scripts, but the tools are shit out-of-the-box in finding problems
_and communicating them to the engineer_. This is one example, but they're
equally bad at guiding the engineer to good design practices that reduces
faults, as I think they should.

Circuit design tools are worse, and engineers must rely on their experience
and keen eye for detail. Some engineers don't have one or both of those. Are
they sloppy? Can't the tools be more intelligent to help?

I think that there is a lot to improve in this domain, and I'm trying to do
that with PCBmodE. Blaming the engineer and falling into the "digital
Stockholm syndrome" isn't the way forward here.

~~~
boldport
As a followup, I've written a 'defence of the "sloppy" engineer'
[http://boldport.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/in-defense-of-
sloppy-...](http://boldport.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/in-defense-of-sloppy-
engineer.html)

~~~
PhantomGremlin
I've used EDA tools (both board design and chip design) for over 30 years, and
in that time there's been one constant: what the designers want to accomplish
is usually at (or beyond) the limit of what the tools and platforms are
capable of. So yes the tools are "shitty" for what we want to accomplish
_tomorrow_. They're superb compared to what we had _yesteryear_.

You might not like my "sloppy" choice of words. But IMO the difference between
good engineers and mediocre ones is exactly what you called a "keen eye for
detail".

I agree the tools could be, and should be, a lot better. It's a copout by the
tool vendors when they produce "thousands of warning and info messages". And
yet the good engineer _must_ wade through those messages. That is part of the
necessary "get on with it" attitude.

------
jwr
I am impressed by the amount of work someone did to make this site completely
unusable on iOS devices.

It loads slowly, poorly animates (what for?), scrolls abysmally, and prevents
zooming in.

I'm sorry for the slightly off-topic comment, but I think this needs to be
said. I long for clean, simple, readable web pages.

~~~
boldport
I'm the author and maker of this board. The blog is hosted on blogger
(Google). When I decided to use blogger I wrongly assumed that it will 'just
work' across platforms, but it hasn't been the case, unfortunately. There
isn't much I can do in terms of configuration, and the only option is to find
a new blogging platform, which I may do in the future.

~~~
mrtbld
I think it is because of the Blogger's "Dynamic Views" template your blog
uses. Maybe another (more classic) template would be better for cross-device
compatibility.

~~~
boldport
I will test that, although I'd normally expect this brand name service's back-
end to handle this stuff gracefully.

~~~
deelowe
Blogger is a rather poorly supported product at Google. I'm sure it's on the
chopping block soon as it duplicates a lot of G+ functionality.

~~~
snogglethorpe
... and to be honest, this might not be such a bad thing. For simple articles,
G+ is about a billion times better than blogger, and would make a pretty good
replacement for many people.

Indeed, ideally as part of such a move, they'd enhance G+ a bit[1] to cover
the areas where it's currently weaker than blogger. Then everybody would
win...

[1] E.g. better support for formatting articles; curently it only supports a
rather pathetic subset of markdown.

------
joelgrus
Very cool, although it seems like it might be simpler to just learn OCaml.

~~~
mturmon
"The heart wants what it wants"

------
ck2
How exactly would you get through TSA with that...

remember they almost shot and killed that MIT student that was wearing some
circuits as art on her shirt

~~~
amirmc
If you can take a laptop through (or in fact _any_ electronics) then in
principle, this should be no problem.

~~~
unimpressive
"Here is a true story about a glass tty: One day an MIT hacker was in a
motorcycle accident and broke his leg. He had to stay in the hospital quite a
while, and got restless because he couldn't hack. Two of his friends therefore
took a terminal and a modem for it to the hospital, so that he could use the
computer by telephone from his hospital bed.

Now this happened some years before the spread of home computers, and computer
terminals were not a familiar sight to the average person. When the two
friends got to the hospital, a guard stopped them and asked what they were
carrying. They explained that they wanted to take a computer terminal to their
friend who was a patient.

The guard got out his list of things that patients were permitted to have in
their rooms: TV, radio, electric razor, typewriter, tape player, ... no
computer terminals. Computer terminals weren't on the list, so the guard
wouldn't let it in. Rules are rules, you know. (This guard was clearly a
droid.)

Fair enough, said the two friends, and they left again. They were frustrated,
of course, because they knew that the terminal was as harmless as a TV or
anything else on the list... which gave them an idea.

The next day they returned, and the same thing happened: a guard stopped them
and asked what they were carrying. They said: "This is a TV typewriter!" The
guard was skeptical, so they plugged it in and demonstrated it. "See? You just
type on the keyboard and what you type shows up on the TV screen." Now the
guard didn't stop to think about how utterly useless a typewriter would be
that didn't produce any paper copies of what you typed; but this was clearly a
TV typewriter, no doubt about it. So he checked his list: "A TV is all right,
a typewriter is all right ... okay, take it on in!"

[Historical note: Many years ago, "Popular Electronics" published solder-it-
yourself plans for a TV typewriter. Despite the essential uselessness of the
device, it was an enormously popular project. Steve Ciarcia, the man behind
"Byte" magazine's "Circuit Cellar" feature, resurrected this ghost in one of
his books of the early 1980s. He ascribed its popularity (no doubt correctly)
to the feeling of power the builder could achieve by being able to decide
himself what would be shown on the TV. --ESR]

[Antihistorical note: On September 23rd, 1992, the L.A. Times ran the
following bit of filler:

    
    
         Solomon Waters of Altadena, a 6-year-old first-grader, came home
         from his first day of school and excitedly told his mother how he
         had written on "a machine that looks like a computer -- but
         without the TV screen."  She asked him if it could have been a
         "typewriter."  "Yeah! Yeah!" he said.  "That's what it was
         called."
    

I have since investigated this matter and determined that many of today's
teenagers have never seen a slide rule, either.... -- ESR]"

[http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/t/TVTypewriters.html](http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/t/TVTypewriters.html)

\----

If you went ahead and assumed that TSA agents are really just cleverly
projected computer algorithms (androids perhaps?), your predictions concerning
their behavior probably wouldn't be far off.

~~~
saraid216
> If you went ahead and assumed that people are really just cleverly projected
> computer algorithms (androids perhaps?), your predictions concerning their
> behavior probably wouldn't be far off.

Fixed that for you.

------
EGreg
I just never understand how OCaml programmers love to party.

~~~
leif
They're functional alcoholics.

------
rlpb
At first I wondered why you needed all those parts just to light an LED. Then
you explained what they were for. Nicely done.

------
duiker101
Well done Saar, nice to seem someone from the Pitch & Mix on HN!

~~~
boldport
Thanks! ;)

------
___1___
I prefer Kevin Mitnicks:

[https://secure.flickr.com/photos/ranh/106709219/](https://secure.flickr.com/photos/ranh/106709219/)

------
sutro
Obligatory link:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YBxeDN4tbk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YBxeDN4tbk)

------
droopybuns
This is cool, but I like Michael Ossmann's better.

[http://ossmann.blogspot.com/2011/02/throwing-star-lan-
tap.ht...](http://ossmann.blogspot.com/2011/02/throwing-star-lan-tap.html)

PCB board for a LAN tap. Definitely one of the coolest business cards I've
received- particularly at a hacker con.

------
pavel_lishin
I think that the banana peel is a reference to this:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1qkd9x/secret_staircase...](http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1qkd9x/secret_staircase_reveals_terrifying_secret/)

------
ChuckMcM
Nicely done, I wonder if you could add a 555 timer with the legs pulled
straight out to the sides. Not sure you could clip it and still plug it in a
socket but you could rewire it 'dead bug' style.

~~~
boldport
That's a thought. I'm interested in new mechanical configurations of
components, and how to hide/embed them into the board in interesting new ways.

------
memset
Next on my wishlist - a business-card-sized emergency soldering iron!

~~~
solistice
[https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9450](https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9450)
it's not business card sized, but it'd probably fit in a pocket.

------
adamnemecek
Love the banana for scale reference.

------
jds375
What a cool idea. Hope he finds a way to make it scalable.

