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> Very different from being able to code-up a web product on a laptop in the dorm where pizza might be your greatest expense. That feeling when you fat fingere

> Very different from being able to code-up a web product on a laptop in the dorm where pizza might be your greatest expense. That feeling when you fat fingered one resistor value on the BOM and you have not noticed even after going through BOM five time before placing the order, then realising this when boards came assembled month later and you couldn't figure why they don't work. The dilemma - go through 100 boards and manually replace each resistor or keep them for parts and run the order again and so on and so on. Completely different to when you have a bug in software and you can just change few lines and deploy.

antoniuschan99 4y ago
That's one nightmare :P. But also with software, because the factory firmware can't be changed! Luckily there's OTA but even that may not save you if it's part of the config file that doesn't change!
robomartin 4y ago
> That feeling when you fat fingered one resistor value on the BOM Three short stories: I did this board almost twenty years ago. FPGAs and a bunch of other stuff. Signals going all the way up to 1.7 GHz. I got the signal and power integrity design of the PCB as close to perfect as could be. It passed emissions testing as well. Somehow I managed to lay out the $5 DC power in connector backwards. Yup. The joke was I could be trusted with multi-giga-Hertz designs but I suck at DC. More recently, we had a few hundred boards assembled. Due to supply chain issues some of the parts on that board are in the "unobtanium" category. The pick-and-place machine screwed-up and rotated some of these impossible-to-get components on a couple dozen boards. Somehow optical inspection did not pick up on it (I have my theory on that one). We blew the top off a couple of those chips on power-up before understanding there was a problem and re-inspecting everything. You can't buy the chips (50+ week lead times) so, a couple dozen of these $1K+ boards are on a pile waiting for new chips. Finally, I found myself having to hand-solder 800 resistors on a bunch of boards because the interface to a device these were talking to changed without notice, requiring pull-downs. The board had no pads for pull-downs. I had to solder these 0402 resistors to existing pads shared by other SMT components. It was about twelve hours of pure agony. That's why I say I must be demented. I like hardware, and I can hate it just as much.

antoniuschan99 4y ago

That's one nightmare :P. But also with software, because the factory firmware can't be changed! Luckily there's OTA but even that may not save you if it's part of the config file that doesn't change!

robomartin 4y ago

> That feeling when you fat fingered one resistor value on the BOM Three short stories: I did this board almost twenty years ago. FPGAs and a bunch of other stuff. Signals going all the way up to 1.7 GHz. I got the signal and power integrity design of the PCB as close to perfect as could be. It passed emissions testing as well. Somehow I managed to lay out the $5 DC power in connector backwards. Yup. The joke was I could be trusted with multi-giga-Hertz designs but I suck at DC. More recently, we had a few hundred boards assembled. Due to supply chain issues some of the parts on that board are in the "unobtanium" category. The pick-and-place machine screwed-up and rotated some of these impossible-to-get components on a couple dozen boards. Somehow optical inspection did not pick up on it (I have my theory on that one). We blew the top off a couple of those chips on power-up before understanding there was a problem and re-inspecting everything. You can't buy the chips (50+ week lead times) so, a couple dozen of these $1K+ boards are on a pile waiting for new chips. Finally, I found myself having to hand-solder 800 resistors on a bunch of boards because the interface to a device these were talking to changed without notice, requiring pull-downs. The board had no pads for pull-downs. I had to solder these 0402 resistors to existing pads shared by other SMT components. It was about twelve hours of pure agony. That's why I say I must be demented. I like hardware, and I can hate it just as much.