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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 ab

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.

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.