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Hack Chat Transcript, Part 1

A event log for PCB Bring-Up Hack Chat

Will it release the Magic Smoke?

dan-maloneyDan Maloney 04/15/2020 at 19:570 Comments

Mihir Shah11:44 AM
Hey everyone! We're using zoom. Chat will also be answered on zoom (just easier that way), but i'll do my best to also add an abbreviated text version here

Mihir Shah11:45 AM
We'll send over a recording after the fact

Cool Mark, thanks. And thanks Mihir - I was just going to ask for that. And welcome!

Mihir Shah11:47 AM
please ask your questions and whatnot here in the hackchat, we'll answer them via video chat in zoom (https://zoom.us/j/93198290181), and try and add an abbreviated answer here in the hackchat.

Tim Brodie joined  the room.11:48 AM

Mihir Shah11:53 AM
Anything in particular people want to see/talk about? good practices on board bring-up? Passing things off to another EE or technician to assist?

Mihir Shah11:54 AM

Ragabash joined  the room.11:54 AM

Mihir Shah11:55 AM
we're here now! chat will be kept here in the hackchat, video/audio is in zoom https://zoom.us/j/93198290181

Mihir Shah11:55 AM
Maybe a good place to start: What is your board bring-up process like? do you do your own hand-assembly/placement?

Just got the Zoom client re-installed - I nuked it a few days ago

MS-BOSS11:56 AM
maybe next time, anything not needing a separate client would be welcome...

Mihir Shah11:56 AM
haha! unsafe?

Andrew Kowalczyk11:57 AM
Reworking 01005s is a nightmare

GERALD KUMAH11:57 AM
Hello is this the PCB chat ?

Inhaled LEDs - yuck!

Ragabash11:57 AM
Knowing the design, resistance check, power, clock, resets

Mark J Hughes11:57 AM
Reworking 01005s is barely possible.

andrew.sandage joined  the room.11:57 AM

Jerry Hubbell11:57 AM
Hi Everyone, I am the VP Engineering for Explore Scientific and the creator of the PMC-Eight astronomical mount system. www.explorescientificusa.com

@MS-BOSS - Trouble is, we can't do a live demo on the Hack Chat.

Nicolas Tremblay joined  the room.11:58 AM

Andrew Kowalczyk11:58 AM
What sort of features do people design in for debug? I use 0-ohm resistors everywhere to hide my mistakes, what do other people do?

Thanks Mihir

Chris Ryding11:58 AM
What software is showing in the video with the layer overlays superimposed on the physical PCB?

Jerry Hubbell11:58 AM
HI Great

Ragabash11:58 AM
For first spin of the board, I try to put 0 ohms Andrew

Mark J Hughes11:59 AM
@Chris Ryding inspectAR -- it's what's being demoed today.

Hemal Chevli11:59 AM
@Chris Ryding its inspectAR software

Hey everyone - we're simulcasting on the Zoom channel now. Please tune in if you can: https://zoom.us/j/93198290181

Jerry Hubbell11:59 AM
I use DipTrace for design

Ragabash11:59 AM
TPs can be an absolute nightmare, I recetnly did a board with 500 TPs. but there was no way to put legend on for all of those, so they get lost super easily

Mark J Hughes12:00 PM
@Jerry Hubbell Not a lot of people use it. I like it though.

Andrew Kowalczyk12:00 PM
Great to hear there'll be free InspectAR support in the future! What sort of process is involved in linking a board using the tool?

We'll officially get started now with a welcome to Mihir and Liam. We're talking about the PCB Bring-Up process today, with a live demo going on over at Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/93198290181

Jerry Hubbell12:00 PM
Interesting

amigabill12:01 PM
Suggestions of things to look for if a processor doesn't seem to boot?

Nicolas Tremblay left  the room.12:01 PM

Victor Lucas joined  the room.12:01 PM

Mihir Shah12:01 PM
inspectAR 2.0 will be free for eagle/kicad users

Andrew Kowalczyk12:01 PM
@amigabill check boot pins! (and resets)

Ragabash12:01 PM
How many layers will inspectAR be supporting?

Mark J Hughes12:01 PM
@amigabill -- is it a new board?

And we'll be recording the demo and we'll post a link later

Mark J Hughes12:02 PM
@Ragabash The layer count does not matter -- any number of layers can be supported.

Go for it! I did a little intro already

Ragabash12:02 PM
Have you run into any issues with board size or net count? Some FPGA and multiprocessor boards would definitely benbefit from this but its a lot of data

ryan joined  the room.12:02 PM

Mark J Hughes12:03 PM
@Ragabash We haven't run into anything we can't do yet.

Ragabash12:04 PM
Have you tried the open source project olympus from Microsoft?

Victor Lucas12:04 PM
Are there any standard rules for bringing up multiple voltages to prevent latchup?

Nice!

Jerry Hubbell12:05 PM
Have you tried using your software with augmented reality glasses?

GERALD KUMAH12:06 PM
which type of board is been displayed

Mihir Shah12:06 PM
rigado ble board

Mark J Hughes12:06 PM
@Ragabash The bigger problem there would be the size of the board vs camera field of view. That looks to be close to the 18" x 24" panel size -- so you'd need to select a high resolution camera and low-distortion optics to capture the entire board (if that's what you wanted to do). You can zoom from inside the software.

GERALD KUMAH12:07 PM
thanks

Jerry Hubbell12:08 PM
Makes sense.

Alistair Cheeseman12:08 PM
can you toggle between the live view of the board and the 3d render/step file provided by the design software?

Mark J Hughes12:08 PM
@Jerry Hubbell Yes -- and it's in the roadmap -- but glasses are expensive -- so the current focus is on inexpensive cameras that are readily available to all engineers. We want it to be easy for people to get started with as low an investment as possible.

GERALD KUMAH12:08 PM
Please can the video be emailed to us afetr the zoom meeting my internet connection is very bad

Ragabash12:08 PM
Thanks @Mark J Hughes

Jerry Hubbell12:08 PM
Thank Mark

Mark J Hughes12:09 PM
@GERALD KUMAH The file is being saved. Email mihir@inspectar.com for a copy in a day or two.

todbot12:09 PM
is there a way to view the video without installing zoom?

GERALD KUMAH12:09 PM
Thank you @Mark J Hughes

Absolutely, I'll post the video with the transcript right after the chat

Mark J Hughes12:09 PM
@todbot I doubt it.

todbot12:10 PM
k, thanks, I'll come back then

Mark J Hughes12:10 PM
@todbot You can likely view it on your phone though.

Ragabash12:10 PM
What computing hardware is required to use inspectAR? I would like to use it with a good camera like the Eakins Sony microscope

Hemal Chevli12:10 PM
I signed up for free account on inspectAR, I don't see windows in downloads, only android and iOS

Mihir Shah12:10 PM
windows and mac are for Pro users.

Mihir Shah12:11 PM
more of an on-boarding experience (it'll be available for anyone to trial with desktop + external camera in a few weeks with the 2.0 release.)

Mark J Hughes12:11 PM
@Ragabash It's multi-platform. You can even get started on your iPhone or Andriod phone.

Mihir Shah12:11 PM
we can get you an early download for desktop, just fill out your info here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/

Mihir Shah12:11 PM
whoops, wrong link! lol https://www.inspectar.com/join-pilot

Hemal Chevli12:11 PM
@Mihir Shah no problem, looking forward

Mark J Hughes12:12 PM
@Ragabash I don't know anything about that particular camera -- but I'm sure we can make it work.

Mark J Hughes12:13 PM
@Hemal Chevli The free account is phone-based only. For a Mac/PC you need to call for onboarding and likely need a Logitech Brio webcam to get started.

Mark J Hughes12:14 PM
@Ragabash Can you give me a bit more information about the microscope? I can't figure out which one you are referring to in a google search.

Ragabash12:15 PM

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Hemal Chevli12:17 PM
@Mark J Hughes I have logi C525 at webcam, let me know if that will work, if yes I'll go ahead and schedule a call

Mark J Hughes12:17 PM
@Ragabash -- That doesn't appear to connect directly to a computer. Which means we'd need custom device drivers. It is possible that we could integrate a simple HDMI to USB capture device, but that would decimate your resolution and eliminate the purpose of using the microscope.

Hemal Chevli12:18 PM
@Mihir Shah thanks! I'll set it up

Mark J Hughes12:18 PM
@Hemal Chevli -- that should work -- the onlything you might lose is a bit of resolution.

Good question!

Mark J Hughes12:19 PM
Who here works from home right now?

Ragabash12:19 PM
Working on getting a lab setup in my new place

Andrew Kowalczyk12:20 PM
I'm currently having to bring up a new (somewhat complicated) board across three states, four EEs, and four SEs. This would be a lifesaver

Alistair Cheeseman12:20 PM
Hardware design engineer. got a home lab set up in the spare room until allowed back in the office

Mark J Hughes12:20 PM
@Andrew Kowalczyk That would be an ideal use case for this software. Give us a call.

Andrew Kowalczyk12:20 PM
Especially given the SEs who need to know where things are on the board but aren't able to run tools (Cadence doesn't like Linux)

Mihir Shah12:20 PM
Thanks! Sign up for a demo here https://www.inspectar.com/join-pilot, we'll get you set up with a Pro license for your team to try out as you're all remote

Andrew Kowalczyk12:21 PM
Thanks! Will do!

Ragabash12:22 PM
For the microscope/inspection camera, generally I would want higher quality optical zoom

Jerry Hubbell12:22 PM
I work from home

Jerry Hubbell12:22 PM
We use SolidWorks for mechanical design

Ragabash12:23 PM
With Allegro, we use database libraries but we generally work separately on board files

Ragabash12:23 PM
We have moved to version control on CogniDox

Jerry Hubbell12:23 PM
We are a very small company so I manage a small engineering team - 6 people.

JIRA for hardware? That's interesting - I've only ever used it for software bug reporting and collaboration during development.

Jerry Hubbell12:24 PM
We manage our work pretty much manually

Peter joined  the room.12:24 PM

Hemal Chevli12:24 PM
We just Jira for firmware dev

Ragabash12:25 PM
A significant amount of time is not fabrication for us but bringup and moreso validation of a complex board. Many of our engineers would love this when trying to go through that

Mihir Shah12:26 PM

https://www.inspectar.com/join-pilot

INSPECTAR

Join inspectAR Pilot

Join the pilot program to use inspectAR with your own custom PCBs to make your prototype engineering more efficient. Come full circle faster your design process

Read this on Inspectar

Jerry Hubbell12:26 PM
That would be great.

amigabill12:27 PM
Will be a new board, open ppc laptop motherboard (sorry I got distracted elsewhere a bit)

Mihir Shah12:27 PM
nice! that'll be great with inspectAR

Hemal Chevli12:27 PM
Do you have some sort of NDA for the designs uploaded??

Ragabash12:27 PM
Finger

Andrew Kowalczyk12:28 PM
On the inverse side, if it's drawing no current, start checking supply enables/thresholds/etc

Hemal Chevli12:28 PM
makes sense

amigabill12:28 PM
Paid designers using expensive ecsd tools, but plan is to import that to kicad

Andrew Kowalczyk12:28 PM
That seems to happen to me way more

Ragabash12:28 PM
If there are no shorts, always look at clocks and resets

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