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Seeking participants with Autodesk Eagle knowledge to participate in a user study

jgarzagu

Hello,

I'm J Garza, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, San Diego, and we're doing a user study on a schematic capture prototype we developed called TypedSchematics. TypedSchematics is a tool with a different approach and workflow for connecting reusable schematic designs, also known as schematic blocks. TypedSchematics accelerates schematic creation, with built-in design validations. The intent of the study is to compare the integration of schematic blocks for creating new schematics between Autodesk Eagle and our tool TypedSchematics, as well as to evaluate the schematic model representation of both.

We are seeking people with Autodesk Eagle / Fusion 360 schematics design knowledge and basic hardware protocol interfaces (e.g., I2C, SPI, Serial) knowledge to participate in a research study. The study will be run fully remotely using Zoom where you will be asked to complete a schematic design using Autodesk Eagle and then using TypedSchematics.

The Zoom session will last for 1 hour and will be scheduled based on your availability. Be expected to screen share an Eagle window during the session. After the session, you will be asked to complete an online questionnaire that takes approximately 25 minutes.

Your participation will be of great help to us in evaluating our tool, apart from giving you knowledge of current research that is being carried out to improve electronic design tools.

To thank you for your participation and feedback, you will receive a $40 Amazon gift card.

Interested participants have the option of reviewing an informative instructional video of our tool prior to the study: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWh3aIeQSMk.

If you are interested in participating in the study, please contact me at jgarzagu at eng.ucsd.edu.

System requirements:

  • A computer (desktop or laptop) with a touchpad or mouse capable of running Zoom and Autodesk Eagle (you can also use Fusion 360 if you already have it installed).
    (*Note: Our system currently doesn’t support touchscreen inputs).
  • Microphone and Speakers

This user study has been approved by the IRB

If I am violating any forum guidelines, please let me know or remove this post.

  • Hi,

    Although I would like to help, it's quite a large request for an hour zoom followed by a questionnaire.
    However, I will add some comments, mainly criticism (no bad thing, it's an opportunity to excel if you have answers or solutions or a roadmap for these), based on viewing the video.

    1. How do you handle blocks that require two or more regulated supply inputs?
    2. Isn't it a bit arbitrary that supply blocks have no connectors, whereas other blocks require them? For instance, surely blocks that use I2C should be connectable without having to have separate SDA and SCL connections, if the connection-less method is considered good by the TypedSchematics system?
    3. Who is the audience? Perhaps the users who will have large enough designs where they may want to reuse large blocks that are not easy to re-create manually, won't be EAGLE users. They will be the large orgs using Cadence, Mentor, Zuken and so on.
    4. Is TypedSchematics intended for commercial users, or hobbyist users? If the latter, many will be using KiCAD, not EAGLE, because KiCAD is free and open source.
    5. Is the benefit just in speed of schematic entry, or are there any benefits for PCB layout?
    6. The automatically created full schematic looks hard to follow, because a normal PCB designer may connect some of the smaller building blocks directly together, without wire connection labels. I find it harder to follow a schematic that has so many separated modules. For instance, I may want the LED to be directly shown on the schematic connected to the microcontroller, with a wire, not a separate labelled wire connection.
    7. What happens if people move the generated schematic elements, and then make changes in the TypedSchematics tool? Would the changes in the generated schematic be lost?


    I'm sure I will think of other things, but these were top of mind for me currently.

  • in reply to shabaz

    Thank you for your comments and questions Shabaz. I am happy to answer your questions.

    First, I am aware that the video I shared does not show the full scope of our system and leaves many unanswered questions. I haven't had time to provide more documentation or a full video explaining the system in detail. I hope that answering your questions helps clarify some doubts.

    1.

    That's a good question, and I'm glad you asked it. Currently, the code is prepared to accept blocks that require more than one input voltage. As well as voltage regulators with more than one output voltage. However, this has not yet been implemented in the UI.

    2.

    Power blocks can also have connectors (inputs and outputs). For example, suppose you have a TI battery charger/regulator with I2C capability to detect battery level (eg BQ25122). That regulator block would have an I2C connector that you can connect to a microcontroller. It is also common to have a GPIO Enable on the regulator block. Currently the system can handle such cases, however we haven't implemented an example for it yet.

    3.

    The current audience is novices and hobbyists who are familiar with EAGLE. Who may not be experts on how to design some commonly used blocks (e.g., battery charger) and would like to get started with some designs provided by us or the community.  

    I personally see many people creating the same designs from scratch over and over again, and I would like to provide some solution to that.

    While we would like to make TypedSchematics compatible with all major CADs, from a software perspective it would take a long time to get our tool to work with all major CADs. However, we see it possible making TypedSchematics compatible with KiCAD in the future.

    4.

    TypedSchematics is intended for EAGLE hobbyist users and beginners. As mentioned above, we see making KiCAD compatible with TypedSchematics in the future. However, after integrating the PCB layout we see some beginners and hobbyists skipping the schematic entry and using the generated Gerbers directly (see below).  

    5.

    TypedSchematics is intended to speed up both schematics and PCB layouts. The software to speed up PCB design works in code, but has not yet been integrated into the user interface. This tool is expected to be 3D.

     6.

    That is very good feedback. I know the wire names have weird annotations that haven't been fixed. However, adding an option to put all the blocks on a single sheet would be a great option. I know it's hard to follow the lines when the blocks are on separate sheets.

    7.

    TypedSchematics is still in beta. The TypedSchematics layout is lost on page refresh. We do not yet have a database to register users and save their changes. Also, we don't have a version for blocks yet to prevent changes to these blocks from affecting the design of people who might use the blocks. Thought has been given to this though and if released to the public the option to save designs would be available.

    ---

    Also, I want to comment that connectors (for example, pin headers) will be a separate block, but which is not available yet.

    I appreciate your questions. If you have any other questions feel free to let me know.

  • in reply to jgarzagu

    Hi J,

    Thank you for the very thorough response!