Inefficiencies in Hardware Bring-up Discussion

What type of information (and medium) do you have about a board while you are testing it?

Everything I can get my hands on. At minimum, a printed copy (on the largest paper that is reasonable) of the schematics and a computer with the PCB layout available (either as an EDA tool or as Gerbers in a viewer.)

Through your experience, what points in your testing workflow do you see as inefficient?

In my experience, the testing/bringup process is inherently inefficient, because you don't know what you don't know. Following good procedures can help reduce some of the inefficiencies, but there's really no way beyond that to speed things up other than experience, and the experience comes from painful hours and days spent stuck on a problem that turns out to be trivial.

What is the biggest problem you’ve faced while performing bring-up on a new PCB?

Connectors having incorrect pinouts. It's the worst when this happens with an external power connector.

What PCB design software did you use (KiCAD, Altium, Eagle, etc)?

I'm most comfortable with EAGLE.

What parts of your PCB design software did you find most helpful with bringing up a new board?

The most useful EDA features for bringup are the ability to highlight individual nets/signals and the ability to snap the schematic view to a specified component, even if it's not on the schematic sheet that is currently in focus.

Thank you for the feedback Russell! The incorrect pinout on connectors is for sure looking like one of the most common problems faced. May I ask why you decide to print a copy of your schematics instead of just using the schematic viewer on your computer in parallel with the PCB layout?

Thank you for the feedback Russell! The incorrect pinout on connectors is for sure looking like one of the most common problems faced. May I ask why you decide to print a copy of your schematics instead of just using the schematic viewer on your computer in parallel with the PCB layout?

I use printed schematics and artwork as well - because I can clip them above the workspace. There is no room for a monitor at this time - too much other instrumentation.

Same here, the monitor is usually busy enough, printed schematics are also good for quick annotation.

MK

I like printed schematics because it's easy to make notes on them, and you can spread out multi-sheet schematics so you can see everything at the same time. As dougw pointed out, printed schematics also lend themselves to hanging from the edge of shelves in a way that laptops don't. If there's enough bench space, I like to have a laptop handy to display the PCB layout. I find it very helpful to be able to see the schematics at the same time as the PCB layout, and having the schematics printed and the layout on the laptop allows me to use the features of the EDA tool (e.g. highlight net) on the layout file while I'm also looking at the schematics.

I should point out that my experience is all hobby-related/small quantity. I'm sure that at industrial scale, there are plenty of efficiencies to be realized that I (and other engineers producing small quantities) simply can't take advantage of.

Thanks dougw michaelkellett rusgray! This was very helpful feedback! Do you think it would be useful if say there was an app for your phone/tablet that could show your board schematics with component and net search functionality that also enabled you to make easy markups? This would leave your laptop open with the PCB layout and reduce the need to print off multiple or large pieces of paper.

derail That is a good idea - I will probably try it with a tablet, maybe even 2 tablets - one for schematic and one for layout...

I'd definitely be willing to give something like that a try, especially if it can load the file formats used by EAGLE. It seems like such an app would be most useful on a tablet; I wouldn't think that a phone screen would be big enough to be of any real utility.