
Intro to modern hardware prototyping - horigome
http://obogason.com/modern_hardware_prototyping/
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krapht
Eh, Eagle in this day in age? If you're going cheap, I'd stick with KiCAD.
It's unintuitive, like GIMP vs Photoshop, but gets the job done with no
restrictions on functionality. I've also heard decent things about
CircuitMaker, but never used it.

If you have any academic links at all though, or don't mind piracy, I'd grab a
student edition of Altium Designer. Solidworks too if you can get it for
mechanical modeling. If you ever make it big, these are the tools you want to
learn and know how to use. You don't mention anything about a good debugger -
this is crucial! If you work with ARM the Segger JLink is the gold standard.

Also you should probably mention where to get cheap stencils, like Osh
Stencils etc. With all the cheap parts going to extra small packages, stencils
are a godsend. Or, just have your prototype made in China at any of the small
board-houses - quite cheap as well compared to the time you might spend doing
board assembly.

Just my quick 2c.

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akiselev
I'm very much against software piracy but if you're starting out in electrical
engineering, you are doing an absolute disservice by not using a pirated
version of Altium. Not only is it basically the industry standard (Cadence,
Orcad, etc are mostly propped up by legacy clients, especially in aerospace
and defence) but its interface and features are leaps and bounds beyond
anything else. Pretty much all ECAD software is a naive port of the pen and
paper schematic design process to mouse and keyboard (it's still called
"schematic capture" in contrast to "PCB design") but Altium has moved far
beyond that, especially with the introduction of cloud features in the last
five years (like an online repository for user and vendor created footprints).
The field of electrical engineering has been extremely averse to the ideas of
open source but for many reasons, Altium's online resources among them, that
is finally starting to change. Eagle does have a large community with
companies like Sparkfun and Adafruit but those pale in comparison to the
community forming around Altium, which is made up of a large number of vendors
and professionals who are starting to grasp the benefits of sharing data.

Considering how much the package costs and how much Altium benefits from the
growing community, I honestly don't think they'd mind if you pirated the
software a few years before you could afford it.

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ploxiln
I used Cadence a fair bit, back in university (CMU) about 8 years ago - it is
really surprisingly poorly made and maintained software.

Very powerful, huge number of features. Crashed if you looked at it funny.
Some windows made with TK, some with Athena widgets, some with GTK1, some with
straight X11. Can't copy and paste between most of them.

I'm glad to hear it's not really the industry standard I had the impression it
was. I had the impression that most purely-hardware-focused engineers didn't
care about software quality much and so the whole industry just naturally
leaned that way.

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akiselev
The thing with hardware is that once you've designed the PCB and it works to
the spec, you don't need to do anything until some part you need goes out of
production. This means that the major ECAD money comes from shops that do a
lot of one off projects which means that aerospace and defense are king. Since
those industries are risk averse and spend much more time in manufacturing and
testing than in design, they never really had much care for the quality of
design software, even when it costs an arm and a leg like Cadence. Since these
industries have extensive quality control and review processes, a bug or a
crash would only cost a little bit of time. Remember though that Orcad was
first developed in the mid-eighties so with the risk averse clients it's no
wonder it hasn't aged well.

But yes, rest assured, outside of some (rather large) niches, no one really
tolerates the garbage that is the old ECAD packages.

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nickff
Site is down for me, here is a link to the Google cached version:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TAFXX1s...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TAFXX1snLgoJ:obogason.com/modern_hardware_prototyping/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca)

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impostervt
I've been getting into playing with Arduino's and Photons, and have some ideas
that I'd like to THINK about taking to market, but all of these sort of intros
seem to stop at the PCB stage. They leave off the part about how to get an
enclosure made - designing one, prototyping it, injection molding, etc.

I think it's because that's where things get really expensive...

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
That and because the vast majority of products can use a standard, off the
shelf enclosure. Problem is that many of the new product designers don't come
from a hardware background and either aren't aware of the huge scope of what
you can buy (and get modified cheaply) off the shelf, or they think that their
product _must_ have a fully custom enclosure.

One of the benefits of having a traditional engineering education and
experience is working alongside other engineers and designers who are trained
in fields you weren't. It's really hard to put that type of combined
experiences into a book or a tutorial.

~~~
impostervt
Is there some way to find "of the shelf" enclosures online?

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HeyLaughingBoy
Besides the other suggestions, you can go to the source. Three of my favorite
electronic enclosure manufacturers are Hammond, Bud and Polycase. Polycase in
particular has pretty low setup and per-unit costs for modifying enclosures.

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bizzleDawg
As an addition to this, it might be useful to go into more detail on the other
aspects of making a hardware based MVP - i.e. 3D design, laser cutting and 3d
printing.

Personally, I've alway gone in for using openSCAD[1] for the 3d design
aspects, though clearly that's when approaching the problem as a programmer!
I've always had laser cutting done by external services, but have a form labs
2 and repraps for printing parts. Perhaps this would justify a separate blog?

[1] [http://www.openscad.org/](http://www.openscad.org/)

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imh
It's great to mention github. Since you point out to be careful that some
software has licenses, it is probably worth noting that software without a
license means it reserves all rights [0]. No license != no copyright.

[0] [https://help.github.com/articles/open-source-
licensing/#what...](https://help.github.com/articles/open-source-
licensing/#what-happens-if-i-dont-choose-a-license)

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horigome
I am working on getting the servers back up.

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antoniuschan99
This tutorial helped me with generating Gerbers since the Jeremy Blum video
didn't really help me there

[https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/using-eagle-board-
layou...](https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/using-eagle-board-
layout/generating-gerbers)

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6stringmerc
Useful read and touches on several concepts I'm working through (or around)
currently on a prototype. 2nd, maybe 3rd iteration thus far. Frustrating but
the good kind of challenge.

