4 ms·

What the hell is going on here? http://images.twibright.com/images/ronja/rx/clock/rx_assembled_stereo0.jpg http://images.twibright.com/images/ronja/rx/clock/rx_

What the hell is going on here? http://images.twibright.com/images/ronja/rx/clock/rx_assembled_stereo0.jpg http://images.twibright.com/images/ronja/rx/clock/rx_assembl... why wouldn't you use a pcb for something like this?

BostonEnginerd 5y ago
This project predates easy and cheap PCB creation.
- alar44 5y ago
  No it doesn't. It's been possible to make homemade PCBs for decades. Even then, they could have at least used perfboard. No idea why someone would want to do it that way. That was fine for the 1920s, but there's no excuse for such poor construction these days.
  - aliswe 5y ago
    from the website: > Things have been made much easier by putting the most complicated electronics on a PCB. maybe it looks like this nowadays? http://www.simandl.cz/stranky/elektro/ronja/ronja.htm http://www.simandl.cz/stranky/elektro/ronja/ronja.htm
  - okl 5y ago
    To the contrary. That is how hams wire up their circuits when using throughhole components. Look here: https://hackaday.com/2016/05/04/getting-ugly-dead-bugs-and-going-to-manhattan/ https://hackaday.com/2016/05/04/getting-ugly-dead-bugs-and-g...
    - alar44 5y ago
      Some do, but it's stupid. There's no reason to do it that way other than laziness. And even that's the wrong word as that's much more difficult than using a board.
      - buescher 5y ago
        You don't get a ground plane with perfboard, unless you submit yourself to the pain of working with vectorboard, and perfboard construction is inherently more fragile than dead bug. If you get good at dead bug construction, you can make changes and do experiments as easily as with a solderless breadboard.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - rasz 5y ago
    This is running at RF frequencies, no you cant use perf board for that.
obnauticus 5y ago
Dead bug style circuit assembly has been popular in the ham community for a long time. It’s definitely a legacy thing but still quite common for hobbyist projects. It’s quite suitable for specific RF situations provided you have done the right characterization work. https://spectrum.ieee.org/with-the-dead-bug-method-hobbyists-can-break-through-the-highfrequency-barrier https://spectrum.ieee.org/with-the-dead-bug-method-hobbyists... https://hackaday.com/2016/05/04/getting-ugly-dead-bugs-and-going-to-manhattan/ https://hackaday.com/2016/05/04/getting-ugly-dead-bugs-and-g...
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
  Why does it look the way it does though? Even without a PCB, this could be neater.
  - buescher 5y ago
    It looks the way it does because: 1) First and foremost, the board or box the components are soldered to forms a very good ground plane 2) The parts are organized so that the circuits fit the enclosure 3) The part leads are used to provide relatively rigid support for the parts 4) Where they can't, it looks like the builder used epoxy You could argue that the builder should have cleaned off the solder flux and you'd probably be wrong, because you probably don't know what a pain it is to really clean off solder flux to the standards of high reliability circuits. Folks that are used to breadboards and perfboard construction have a hard time appreciating the care that goes into good dead-bug assembly. That is probably a fairly high performance circuit and is probably much more rugged than the typical perfboard sewing card.
- Fnoord 5y ago
  > Dead bug style circuit assembly has been popular in the ham community for a long time. How ironic, given the website also does not support HTTPS.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
RF_Savage 5y ago
Initial RONJA prototypes and versions ware built before the time of cheap chinese pcb fabs. They would have likely had to pay between 150 and 500eur per pcb round. We live in such nice times these days for electronics design that even hobbyists can afford multiple prototype rounds with assembly. Now if the silicon shortage would just go away...
lucasvo 5y ago
It makes me happy and sentimental to see this post show up on hackernews. I was a contributor to the Ronja project in my teens. Karel (`clock`) taught me so much about open source and truly believed in pushing open technology forward. I was 14 at the time and he just finished university and taught me a ton mostly late at nights on the swiss linux user group's IRC channels. A lot of the replies point out that cheap PCBs were not readily accessible. Clock and I were both living in Switzerland and prototyping PCBs especially in Switzerland was very costly. This kept us away from developing PCBs for a while. We did want to build a 100mbit version and that was significantly easier using SMD components and a multilayer PCB so we started working on that. When we had the first prototype I actually took a train to Prague when I was 14 years old and went to a PCB fab to pick up 50 or so along with all the parts. This saved us a few thousand dollars and we tried to recoup the cost by selling kits. Fun times :) The philosophy of the project was also to build it only with open source projects (something that wasn't feasible for the PCB design - we used Eagle which at least was free to use). The dead bug style worked very well and was extremely simple but of course not aesthetically pleasing when compared to what you can order online today. But it also meant that you could build it yourself without the need to order a PCB. We used a local community run welding shop to build some of steel mounts: http://images.twibright.com/tns/1a52.html http://images.twibright.com/tns/1a52.html

BostonEnginerd 5y ago

This project predates easy and cheap PCB creation.

alar44 5y ago
No it doesn't. It's been possible to make homemade PCBs for decades. Even then, they could have at least used perfboard. No idea why someone would want to do it that way. That was fine for the 1920s, but there's no excuse for such poor construction these days.
- aliswe 5y ago
  from the website: > Things have been made much easier by putting the most complicated electronics on a PCB. maybe it looks like this nowadays? http://www.simandl.cz/stranky/elektro/ronja/ronja.htm http://www.simandl.cz/stranky/elektro/ronja/ronja.htm
- okl 5y ago
  To the contrary. That is how hams wire up their circuits when using throughhole components. Look here: https://hackaday.com/2016/05/04/getting-ugly-dead-bugs-and-going-to-manhattan/ https://hackaday.com/2016/05/04/getting-ugly-dead-bugs-and-g...
  - alar44 5y ago
    Some do, but it's stupid. There's no reason to do it that way other than laziness. And even that's the wrong word as that's much more difficult than using a board.
    - buescher 5y ago
      You don't get a ground plane with perfboard, unless you submit yourself to the pain of working with vectorboard, and perfboard construction is inherently more fragile than dead bug. If you get good at dead bug construction, you can make changes and do experiments as easily as with a solderless breadboard.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- rasz 5y ago
  This is running at RF frequencies, no you cant use perf board for that.

obnauticus 5y ago

Dead bug style circuit assembly has been popular in the ham community for a long time. It’s definitely a legacy thing but still quite common for hobbyist projects. It’s quite suitable for specific RF situations provided you have done the right characterization work. https://spectrum.ieee.org/with-the-dead-bug-method-hobbyists-can-break-through-the-highfrequency-barrier https://spectrum.ieee.org/with-the-dead-bug-method-hobbyists... https://hackaday.com/2016/05/04/getting-ugly-dead-bugs-and-going-to-manhattan/ https://hackaday.com/2016/05/04/getting-ugly-dead-bugs-and-g...

2muchcoffeeman 5y ago
Why does it look the way it does though? Even without a PCB, this could be neater.
- buescher 5y ago
  It looks the way it does because: 1) First and foremost, the board or box the components are soldered to forms a very good ground plane 2) The parts are organized so that the circuits fit the enclosure 3) The part leads are used to provide relatively rigid support for the parts 4) Where they can't, it looks like the builder used epoxy You could argue that the builder should have cleaned off the solder flux and you'd probably be wrong, because you probably don't know what a pain it is to really clean off solder flux to the standards of high reliability circuits. Folks that are used to breadboards and perfboard construction have a hard time appreciating the care that goes into good dead-bug assembly. That is probably a fairly high performance circuit and is probably much more rugged than the typical perfboard sewing card.
Fnoord 5y ago
> Dead bug style circuit assembly has been popular in the ham community for a long time. How ironic, given the website also does not support HTTPS.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

RF_Savage 5y ago

Initial RONJA prototypes and versions ware built before the time of cheap chinese pcb fabs. They would have likely had to pay between 150 and 500eur per pcb round. We live in such nice times these days for electronics design that even hobbyists can afford multiple prototype rounds with assembly. Now if the silicon shortage would just go away...

lucasvo 5y ago

It makes me happy and sentimental to see this post show up on hackernews. I was a contributor to the Ronja project in my teens. Karel (`clock`) taught me so much about open source and truly believed in pushing open technology forward. I was 14 at the time and he just finished university and taught me a ton mostly late at nights on the swiss linux user group's IRC channels. A lot of the replies point out that cheap PCBs were not readily accessible. Clock and I were both living in Switzerland and prototyping PCBs especially in Switzerland was very costly. This kept us away from developing PCBs for a while. We did want to build a 100mbit version and that was significantly easier using SMD components and a multilayer PCB so we started working on that. When we had the first prototype I actually took a train to Prague when I was 14 years old and went to a PCB fab to pick up 50 or so along with all the parts. This saved us a few thousand dollars and we tried to recoup the cost by selling kits. Fun times :) The philosophy of the project was also to build it only with open source projects (something that wasn't feasible for the PCB design - we used Eagle which at least was free to use). The dead bug style worked very well and was extremely simple but of course not aesthetically pleasing when compared to what you can order online today. But it also meant that you could build it yourself without the need to order a PCB. We used a local community run welding shop to build some of steel mounts: http://images.twibright.com/tns/1a52.html http://images.twibright.com/tns/1a52.html