6 ms·

JITX – Software-Defined Electronics

87 points by lelf 6y ago

mikewarot 6y ago
The demo is impressive. It's not clear how much of the software will be open source, or closed.
rock_hard 6y ago
It looks cool but unclear what the market is? I don’t know too many EEs that can code And I don’t know that many software engineers either that know enough about electrical engineering to leverage this as part of their toolchain It also seems like one way street? Like how do you go back and forth with PCB layouting?
- kelvie 6y ago
  Probably the other way around, software developers that want to get into EE as a hobby/side gig/startup. Or that like version control and whatnot. I have an EE degree equivalent (i.e. I am qualified for entry-level EE jobs) but have been a software dev my entire career -- if I wanted to branch into circuit / PCB design a tool like this would be the first one I'd look to, just like how I'd look toward OpenScad for mechanical design.
- bb88 6y ago
  To be fair, this isn't so much about software engineering as it is schematic design with a text file. It's more or less the same things as SPICE simulators which EE's are hopefully familiar enough with. For extremely large designs with a large number of pins on a bus, it's hard to validate all the pins line up correctly in a visual schematic. On a text file, it's really more like a data structure which can be easily validated. See also skidl: https://pypi.org/project/skidl/ https://pypi.org/project/skidl/
- vadavaski 6y ago
  > I don’t know too many EEs that can code Do we live in the same word? haha every EE I've worked with knows ho to program because it part of their training as an EE (which of course does not mean jquery or any other volatile webdev bs) > And I don’t know that many software engineers More often, since it's not a substantial chunk of their training
- DHaldane 6y ago
  Our customers are electrical engineers -- electrical engineers on small teams that need to move faster with fewer errors, all the way up to senior EEs with a few decades of experience who want to automate design validation to ensure consistent quality. We haven't found programming skills to be a big blocker. You don't have to be an elite coder to use JITX. Most EEs have banged out a quick matlab or python script at some point, which is plenty of experience. We worked a lot on the semantics of the language to make it correspond to how EEs think about designs, which I beleive helps. Not a one-way street -- you can flow designs back and forth between JITX and the CAD tools we support. It was hard for us to get working, but it is important. At least until we have all of PCB design fully automated.
smilekzs 6y ago
Seems to be mainly focusing on the front end (schematic) part of the design, which is smart because PCB layout is a much bigger can of worms. Some casual overly-critical observations (from the PoV of an embedded hobbyist): This really consists of: (1) a "smart netlist" not dissimilar to Verilog, as an alternative of traditional graphics-based schematic capture (2) on top of it, automatic component selection (3) pre-defined bus types and topologies to simplify interconnection. The value of #1 is debateable. For digital-heavy circuits, I do prefer text-based representation, but of course it depends on how terse it is. However when it comes to analog, the graphical representation is way more powerful, as it naturally reveals the topology of the circuit, while anything text-based obscures it by design. The schematic generated by the tool is nowhere close to human-readable, let alone modifyable (you aren't supposed to modify that anyway if the netlist is the source of truth), and AFAIK there has never been a drive to automate netlist-to-schematic, even with metadata annotation. #2 sure is a bold proposal, and TBH I see it as the "core competency" of a schematic engineer --- something you cannot effectively automate out of. Even if you could, not sure real engineers would actually follow the, uh, "advice" from such tools. For smaller and commonly used things (passives, discrete semiconductors, building-block ICs) of course there is value, but arguably this is a feature, not a product. Then for bigger things that often dictate the rest of the design, just having a part handed to me is clearly not enough --- a good engineer needs to understand the multitude of trade-offs and provide justification on why a specific part / part group is chosen, more often than not based on part quantitative (maybe automate-able) and part qualitative (unlikely to be automated) measures. #3 is where the money resides and synergizes with #1, although arguably tools like this (so-called pinout editor or configuration tool) had always been a first-party thing. Very useful for high pin count digital work. The database part of this needs to be hand-curated, but it only needs to scale as fast as the manufacturer can churn out new parts. Also nit: It's almost always better to use an established general-purpose PL as the base, if programmability is the selling point. See Chisel, Bluespec, PCBDL, SKIDL, PyPCB, ... If you insist you can still build a symbolic representation like Tensorflow, but having to learn yet another esoteric PL is a really big barrier even for coding people.
- bb88 6y ago
  What I really want is something that can validate a pcb layout for correctness, so say, high speed lines are validated to not have issues given a particular manufacturer's stackup. I would like to build my own gigabit ethernet router with maybe specific hardware that doesn't come on a normal router.
obnauticus 6y ago
I’ve been using the demo for a few months now — it is impressive software.
RantyDave 6y ago
Broken link in footer: https://www.jitx.com/capabilities#examplework https://www.jitx.com/capabilities#examplework
- DHaldane 6y ago
  Thanks!
bschwindHN 6y ago
Some questions: * Does it require a network connection to run? * A quote from the demo video: "A different board is generated every time" - Is there a way to stabilize the output so the same input always generates the same exact design every time? * The generated kicad PCB layout didn't match the output preview output in the demo video, and the FPGA was floating off the board. What happened there? * Does this tool do auto-routing of traces?
- DHaldane 6y ago
  - Some features (like the part solver) use some cloud services that you need to be on the internet to use. Most of the software runs on your local machine - Running the same generator twice will produce the same design each time (but the design files will be generated afresh). - Bug that is now fixed. - We haven't released our autorouter yet because it is still in the early stages.
seeyacall 6y ago
https://docs.qq.com/sheet/DTUNBRnBvRktkZE9q?tab=BB08J2 https://docs.qq.com/sheet/DTUNBRnBvRktkZE9q?tab=BB08J2
ctas 6y ago
This looks interesting. I've been planning to design a PCB for a capacitive keyboard this year and wonder if this is suitable for a developer who's not an EE. The capacitors must be positioned according to the keyboard layout. This tool appears to do the layout for you. Am I right?
- DHaldane 6y ago
  We can do both automated and programmatic layout. So you can add in hard placement constraints for location critical parts, then leave the rest to the optimization engine.

87 points by lelf 6y ago

The demo is impressive. It's not clear how much of the software will be open source, or closed.

It looks cool but unclear what the market is? I don’t know too many EEs that can code And I don’t know that many software engineers either that know enough about electrical engineering to leverage this as part of their toolchain It also seems like one way street? Like how do you go back and forth with PCB layouting?

kelvie 6y ago
Probably the other way around, software developers that want to get into EE as a hobby/side gig/startup. Or that like version control and whatnot. I have an EE degree equivalent (i.e. I am qualified for entry-level EE jobs) but have been a software dev my entire career -- if I wanted to branch into circuit / PCB design a tool like this would be the first one I'd look to, just like how I'd look toward OpenScad for mechanical design.
bb88 6y ago
To be fair, this isn't so much about software engineering as it is schematic design with a text file. It's more or less the same things as SPICE simulators which EE's are hopefully familiar enough with. For extremely large designs with a large number of pins on a bus, it's hard to validate all the pins line up correctly in a visual schematic. On a text file, it's really more like a data structure which can be easily validated. See also skidl: https://pypi.org/project/skidl/ https://pypi.org/project/skidl/
vadavaski 6y ago
> I don’t know too many EEs that can code Do we live in the same word? haha every EE I've worked with knows ho to program because it part of their training as an EE (which of course does not mean jquery or any other volatile webdev bs) > And I don’t know that many software engineers More often, since it's not a substantial chunk of their training
DHaldane 6y ago
Our customers are electrical engineers -- electrical engineers on small teams that need to move faster with fewer errors, all the way up to senior EEs with a few decades of experience who want to automate design validation to ensure consistent quality. We haven't found programming skills to be a big blocker. You don't have to be an elite coder to use JITX. Most EEs have banged out a quick matlab or python script at some point, which is plenty of experience. We worked a lot on the semantics of the language to make it correspond to how EEs think about designs, which I beleive helps. Not a one-way street -- you can flow designs back and forth between JITX and the CAD tools we support. It was hard for us to get working, but it is important. At least until we have all of PCB design fully automated.

smilekzs 6y ago

Seems to be mainly focusing on the front end (schematic) part of the design, which is smart because PCB layout is a much bigger can of worms. Some casual overly-critical observations (from the PoV of an embedded hobbyist): This really consists of: (1) a "smart netlist" not dissimilar to Verilog, as an alternative of traditional graphics-based schematic capture (2) on top of it, automatic component selection (3) pre-defined bus types and topologies to simplify interconnection. The value of #1 is debateable. For digital-heavy circuits, I do prefer text-based representation, but of course it depends on how terse it is. However when it comes to analog, the graphical representation is way more powerful, as it naturally reveals the topology of the circuit, while anything text-based obscures it by design. The schematic generated by the tool is nowhere close to human-readable, let alone modifyable (you aren't supposed to modify that anyway if the netlist is the source of truth), and AFAIK there has never been a drive to automate netlist-to-schematic, even with metadata annotation. #2 sure is a bold proposal, and TBH I see it as the "core competency" of a schematic engineer --- something you cannot effectively automate out of. Even if you could, not sure real engineers would actually follow the, uh, "advice" from such tools. For smaller and commonly used things (passives, discrete semiconductors, building-block ICs) of course there is value, but arguably this is a feature, not a product. Then for bigger things that often dictate the rest of the design, just having a part handed to me is clearly not enough --- a good engineer needs to understand the multitude of trade-offs and provide justification on why a specific part / part group is chosen, more often than not based on part quantitative (maybe automate-able) and part qualitative (unlikely to be automated) measures. #3 is where the money resides and synergizes with #1, although arguably tools like this (so-called pinout editor or configuration tool) had always been a first-party thing. Very useful for high pin count digital work. The database part of this needs to be hand-curated, but it only needs to scale as fast as the manufacturer can churn out new parts. Also nit: It's almost always better to use an established general-purpose PL as the base, if programmability is the selling point. See Chisel, Bluespec, PCBDL, SKIDL, PyPCB, ... If you insist you can still build a symbolic representation like Tensorflow, but having to learn yet another esoteric PL is a really big barrier even for coding people.

bb88 6y ago
What I really want is something that can validate a pcb layout for correctness, so say, high speed lines are validated to not have issues given a particular manufacturer's stackup. I would like to build my own gigabit ethernet router with maybe specific hardware that doesn't come on a normal router.

obnauticus 6y ago

I’ve been using the demo for a few months now — it is impressive software.

RantyDave 6y ago

Broken link in footer: https://www.jitx.com/capabilities#examplework https://www.jitx.com/capabilities#examplework

DHaldane 6y ago
Thanks!

bschwindHN 6y ago

Some questions: * Does it require a network connection to run? * A quote from the demo video: "A different board is generated every time" - Is there a way to stabilize the output so the same input always generates the same exact design every time? * The generated kicad PCB layout didn't match the output preview output in the demo video, and the FPGA was floating off the board. What happened there? * Does this tool do auto-routing of traces?

DHaldane 6y ago
- Some features (like the part solver) use some cloud services that you need to be on the internet to use. Most of the software runs on your local machine - Running the same generator twice will produce the same design each time (but the design files will be generated afresh). - Bug that is now fixed. - We haven't released our autorouter yet because it is still in the early stages.

seeyacall 6y ago

https://docs.qq.com/sheet/DTUNBRnBvRktkZE9q?tab=BB08J2 https://docs.qq.com/sheet/DTUNBRnBvRktkZE9q?tab=BB08J2

ctas 6y ago

This looks interesting. I've been planning to design a PCB for a capacitive keyboard this year and wonder if this is suitable for a developer who's not an EE. The capacitors must be positioned according to the keyboard layout. This tool appears to do the layout for you. Am I right?

DHaldane 6y ago
We can do both automated and programmatic layout. So you can add in hard placement constraints for location critical parts, then leave the rest to the optimization engine.