I don't see many KiCad projects with detailed notes in the board files or schematic, which is kinda sad because it's a great way to keep notes for reference and important design descriptions.
My KiCad schematics and board files are absolutely littered with notes, with things from calculations for things to why things are done they way they are.
I wish more people would do it, makes things easier on everyone.
@gregdavill Yeah, I find a lot of people really don't use the hierarchical sheets to their full potential, if they even use them at all, they just bump the page size.
I also wish people would stop just smearing global labels over everything,.
I've been thinking about dedicating the root sheet to a block diagram and stuff like that, but I tend to to just interleave that stuff within the schematic pages. but having a dedicated overview page is not a bad idea.
@lethalbit@gregdavill I normally have the first/top level page just be connections between other sheets and some high level notes, but not to that extent. Fab notes live separately.
Has anyone used OpenEMS to calculate trace impedance profiles from a PCB stackup before?
I'm looking around for decent and fast 2d field solvers for that kinda thing but outside of like 4 HUGE and expensive software suites there really isn't anything for the at home catgirl
@azonenberg@lethalbit The best free 2D transmission line field solver is TNT-MMTL. Developed during the 1980s by Mayo Clinic’s Special Purpose Processor Development Group, stopped development and GPL'd in 2004 - it's ancient but it still works. It can be difficult (but possible, after applying patches) to build it on a modern system so it's easier to use the Win32 installer (I was working on a WebAssembly port but didn't have time to finish it). You can find source code and installers on SourceForge, and a few tutorials on YouTube.
@azonenberg@lethalbit full-wave 3D field solvers like openEMS can definitely be used for this purpose but it's massively overkill for simple transmission lines, and it can also be less accurate since it's extremely sensitive to meshing. Furthermore, FDTD in particular will have great trouble on modeling fine structures like solder masks - you have a 35 micrometer layer on top of a 1.6 mm board. So 2D solvers is strongly preferred to 3D.
Something that probably only I would find useful, but would be nice in KiCad is the ability to assign a nested sheet a schematic symbol, and have the pins match up to the sheet pins.
@lethalbit i agree it'd be nice if at least the exposed hierarchical labels (and their positions) were saved with the sub-sheet, which would make a sheet more symbol-like. It would be nice to make re-use/DRY easier. Currently I have a folder of sub-sheet modules I maintain, but the workflow feels a bit hacky in places.
Spiral bound notebooks, like the ones with the big spiral on the top, common in sketch books, is a huge pain in the ass trying to draw all the way to the edge of the paper.
My hand always ends up bumping the spiral and jolting my lines >:(
Dear application developers, please pleaseplease stop throwing garbage into ~ we have .cache/.config/.local for a good reason, I don't need your garbage polluting my home directory making things a huge pain, thanks.
@lethalbit ohhh! yeah, that's the HD68 and they do have an IDC variant. I thought you meant the big 0.1 pitch 2-row things.
They are indeed the same as the external plugs but crimp-on for convenience/mass-manufacture.
They might have turned up on CD drives but I've mostly seen them on later DDS tape drives and hard drives.
I have an Amphenol HD68 internal SCSI cable around here somewhere which is twisted-pair. The cables crimp onto an untwisted section that happens every few inches.
I fixed my cohost bot, logicbot to allow for more than one output and also fixed the bug that was causing the netlists to be reduced to pure AOI netlists, so now we have things like muxes, and XOR gates and all that good stuff,
The general gist of how it works is that it randomly picks a number of expressions to generate (1 to 4) then for each expression it randomly picks how many terms it will have.
Once that's done, it generates a LUT with that many columns and fills it out randomly.
The LUT is then converted into Algebraic Normal Form and then either expressly simplified or not.
Once that's done it generates Verilog which is cammed into Yosys with some processing, then the netlist SVG is generated from that.
@lethalbit been struggling with that myself today. in the end I hyperfocused on a thing I was not supposed to be working on but still ended up being useful, but the thing I really really needed to get done did not get done and aaaaaaaaaaa