3 ms·
> "One of my early assignments was to lay out a printed circuit board. My electrical engineer gave me a schematic and identified each part type, be it a TO5 tra
by leroy_masochist 7y ago
> "One of my early assignments was to lay out a printed circuit board. My electrical engineer gave me a schematic and identified each part type, be it a TO5 transistor, carbon resistor, tantalum foil capacitor, et cetera. My task was to fit all the components on a fixed size board and connect them according to the schematic with copper circuit runs on the back of the board."
This sounds like it would be an incredibly satisfying job, especially given that there was constant variation in what he had to build
- pinewurst 7y agoIt’s interesting that things weren’t so siloed then, that a draftsman could be an ad hoc PCB designer.
- knolax 7y agoTBF a lot of what he did sounds like work that would be done by the autorouter on most electronics CAD today.
- rcxdude 7y agoAutorouting is still not generally used very much in PCB design. I suspect it could be used more than it currently is, but generally you spend a lot more time specifying design rules and the results are often quite poor.
- raverbashing 7y agos/siloed/high speed At today's circuits number of layers, speeds and frequencies it's impossible to do it by hand. Sure, you could train your average engineer to use Cadence/Mentor, etc but it's usually the design engineer that does capture and PCB routing.
- _wzsf 7y agoSlow != impossible.
- goatinaboat 7y agoDraftsman was always a skilled job, it was never about merely producing neat version of an engineers notes, such as a typist.
- jnwatson 7y agoBoard layout is still an in-demand field.
- xnyan 7y agoIn demand if you already have the skill. Not in demand if you’re a draftsman or another unrelated skill and want to learn or no?