We're very excited to be joined on this episode by Ben Jordan.  Ben, who was previously at Altium for many years, now works at Autodesk as a Senior Product Manager for the Fusion 360 Electronics product.

We chat about:

• Why we call them DuPont headers
• Machine pin headers are awesome
• A brief history of Altium's founding in Australia as Protel Systems
• Chris' love for Australia
• Lots of Ben's dad jokes
• The Coriolis Effect, Ben's new show with Bil Herd
• Fusion 360 - the benefits of using a unified ECAD-MCAD-SIM software platform
• Chris has finally found a perforated cardboard tab that actually works:  https://www.packworld.com/issues/sustainability/article/21136720/nespresso-coffee-capsule-made-from-80-recycled-content
• Ben's pet peeve - people who abuse nonstick pans

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Full transcript:

[00:00:00] Chris: Welcome to the pick place podcast. The show where we talk about electronics, manufacturing and everything related to getting a circuit board into the world. This is Chris Denney with Worthington,

[00:00:18] Melissa: and this is Melissa Hough with CircuitHub.

[00:00:21] Chris: Welcome back, Melissa.

[00:00:22] Melissa: Welcome back, Chris. Big announcement, we reached 10,000 downloads.

[00:00:29] Chris: Yeah, wait. Hey, we got to put those horns back in.

[00:00:31] Melissa: Okay. Yeah. Insert horns here.

[00:00:37] Chris: insert horn sound again. What did we do that for the 1000 downloads or something? I forget what it was the first time.

[00:00:42] Melissa: I think it must have been. Something like that.

[00:00:44] Chris: It's very exciting. Reaching a milestone like that. It's kind of shocking to think that like your voice has been replayed 10 times, 10,000 times. It's kind of terrifying.

[00:00:56] Melissa: Yeah. It's really weird to think of that.

[00:00:58] Chris: It's very weird to think about. And we also, I, I meant to put this in our notes for the show, but we also got a nice shout out from Chris Gammell at on his podcast, the amp power. He listened to the show and recommended it, which was pretty cool.

So if you're, if you're coming from that welcome. I think you're going to feel comfortable here.

[00:01:13] Melissa: I think so.

[00:01:15] Chris: So a few episodes ago I was talking about these, these headers that I, I was calling Arduino headers. Cause I didn't know what else to call them because they, they, you know, I know them from our, do we know this is like the if you've seen an Arduino, you know, exactly the headers I'm talking about, right.

And that's why I call them Arduino headers, but apparently the more common name as a listener named Dan emailed to let us know the more common name is a DuPont header, which. So normally, when somebody explains something like this, to me, there's like this part of my brain where like, I picture my brain, like I have an enormous warehouse.

Right. And like, all the memories are there, but like my forklift is generally in need of [00:02:00] service. So I kind of struggled to pull everything out, but then like somebody comes along and they're like, here, I'll jump, start your forklift. And then we get moving and they mentioned something like DuPont headers.

And it's like, oh yeah, yeah. I remember that now. No clue I had, no, I never heard this phrase in my life. I never, so it totally blew my mind to hear this DuPont header thing. But he, he shared an article and we'll put it in the show notes where this, this guy, Matt, he he'd dug into the history of why we call them DuPont headers and how they've changed over time and what they're useful for.

Dan also shared this like amazing YouTube video of this guy who just like wax poetic about machine pen, headers, and how much he absolutely loved them and how they were like the greatest things since sliced bread. And after watching that video, I am, I am a total believer. I am a total believer in the Swiss pin header that the machine pin header, that is, that is one cool product.

And we've gotten plenty of them. The funny thing about those is we, we sometimes get them where a customer means to give us a part number for a DuPont header, which I'm going to call them from now on. Right. Because that's going to get with the yeah. With the cool kids, right. But, but then they'll specify machine, pin header, but they don't always fit perfectly, like, depending on how you did your footprint, like it may not.

And so we get these weird situations where we kind of struggled to solder these things. And even though the pitch is the same, like maybe the whole size isn't quite right. And then like the solder looks weird on them and, and anyway, but they're very cool how people use them like that you can make, you can like custom make your own through hole sockets.

So if you have like a dip IC, you can like create your own socket without having to have a dedicated socket for it was in the, he had like, I dunno, the video is awesome. We'll, we'll make sure to include it in the show notes. Def definitely worth watching. I think our audience would, would eat that up for sure.

Did you watch, did you watch that video or anything that Dan sent on?

[00:03:59] Melissa: No, I [00:04:00] haven't yet.

[00:04:00] Chris: Yeah, it would probably. I fear it would bore you to tears, but it was great. It was great.

[00:04:06] Melissa: I'm sure it wouldn't. No, I think our listeners, our listeners will definitely want to geek out on it.

[00:04:12] Chris: Well, I it's just like the time that you, you, and Renno thought that the whole episode on reflow soldering would be boring as all get out.

And we got, we had all these listeners say, no, we loved it

[00:04:23] Melissa: or almost all of our episodes.

[00:04:25] Chris: Yeah right. No, that sounds really boring, but we're going to do it anyway. Maybe that's why we've only had 10,000 downloads and not a hundred thousand downloads Got to mix it up. Well, here's one, I think, I think today we're going to get a lot of downloads for I'm.

I'm super, super excited to have our guest on the show today. He his name is Ben and Ben Jordan, and he's currently working at Autodesk, which is this tiny little startup company that nobody's ever heard of before. As the senior product manager for the fusion 360 electronic. Product, if I'm calling that right.

And yeah. Welcome to the show, Ben,

[00:05:03] Ben: thank you. Yeah, it's a, it's an honor to be here and thanks for inviting me. And you know, I actually met you, Chris at maker fair in New York city in, I want to say it was 2014.

[00:05:18] Melissa: Wow.

[00:05:18] Chris: There's see. There's my forklift being broken. That's where we met?

[00:05:21] Ben: It may have been 2015 and I was okay, so a little bit of background.

I'm not actually really known for being an Autodesker, or I've only been at Autodesk for a year.

[00:05:35] Chris: I was wondering if you wanted to touch on where you were before that

[00:05:37] Ben: it's okay. Like it's, it's, it's real history. I don't, I don't rewrite history. Like some people in modern times tend to like to do. I worked at Altium

october, 2004, October 11th, to be precise 2004 until July 30th, 31st, last year, so [00:06:00] 16 and a half years. And I was, I was a product manager there too. And then, and then at the time I met you, I was director of community tools and content, which is basically a fancy way of saying the senior product manager and sort of business owner for circuit maker.

Right. And we, we just launched circuit maker as a free alternative for open source and hobbyists. And we were doing that at MakerFaire. And you come over to the booth and we got talking and I realized I was confused at first. I thought, is Chris, is Chris from this manufacturing company?

Or is he from CircuitHub? You know, we'd been talking to CircuitHub and working on a CircuitHub connection. So people could release a design and then click one button to go through and it would load it into the CircuitHub page. And you could get a quote and, and just go ahead and build it.

And then you explained to me, no, like I'm from Worthington. We actually partner with CircuitHub and do assembly and you should come and check us out. And then it was probably a year later that I actually came to visit Worthington's factory. And that was a really great visit and tour and super productive. And we made a video and it was a lot of

fun video.

[00:07:18] Chris: That video is actually gotten quite a few views. I, I looked it up when I reached out to you to see how many, and of course the forklift is broken. I can't remember how many views it had, but I was surprised at how many people yeah. Watched

it. It did well. It did well. I posted it in. In a second makeup blog and everything, but but I'll tell you what, it's hard being a business owner.

When you, you, your only product is a product that you don't sell and doesn't actually have any income from it. So somehow, somehow, even though I, I love the product and I was really enthusiastic about the community that was destined to be a place I couldn't stay. So [00:08:00] so one thing led to another and in the long run I decided I'd, I'd probably want to make some change and move, move somewhere where I can and have still have a product influence and make an impact to users who are with their skin in the game, you know, with people.

Yeah. And, and I had had some other friends over at Autodesk who were also one or two of them were XLT and people who had worked with years before he is earlier and, and had a good relationship with, and you know, there, that's not why I got the job. Of course they order desk is very disciplined about how it hires people.

So I did have to, you know, I did have to go through all the same as anyone else, but, but there, there it was. And here I am and and looking forward to more cool stuff in the future. Well,

thanks for. Taking us on that journey. I didn't realize you'd been with Altium for that long. I, when I was looking at your LinkedIn profile, it looked like you'd only been there for seven years, but you'd been there for almost sixteen.

[00:09:12] Ben: Cause the last seven years I've been at Altium in the United States, but a lot of people forget is that it was a company that was founded in Australia where I grew up.

[00:09:22] Chris: It wasn't, it wasn't it from Tasmania.

[00:09:24] Ben: It was originally from Hobart Tasmania. The founder, Nick Martin was kind of a genius visionary.

He was working at university of Hobart as a tech or something, some kind of research assistant or something. And he was a good programmer and they asked him to look at different workstation based printed circuit, board design, and schematic design tools. At the time they were either mainframe software or something you needed to buy a dedicated workstation [00:10:00] for.

Daisy CAD netics or, you know, mentor graphics with their Apollo workstations.

So what year are we talking when he got started? Like what, because I'm fascinated by the history free of all this stuff. Yeah.

So, so he was evaluating these tools for the university, I think right around the 19 82 83

[00:10:20] Chris: timeframe.

Oh, wow. Okay. So literally older than me. And there was,

[00:10:24] Ben: yeah. And there was, there were the only tools on the market were outrageously expensive and not, and, and very hard to use. And and so he decided to write his own and he wrote it in turbo Pascal on a PC because 81, you know, IBM released the, yeah, the PC and then 82 or 83, they released the 80 with a 2 8, 6 CPU.

So he had one of those at the university and wrote the software on it himself. Showed it around to a bunch of people in late 1984. Got some, got another, a friend of his who was an electrical engineer who loved the idea, invested in the startup for them. And they launched what became Protel and Protel their first product was a PCB tool for DAS called auto tracks.

And they had auto tracks and the head schematic was just called schematic the program. And they did a one page ad in a, in an Australian electronics magazine. I forget which one it was was something like electronics Australia. One of the ones that no longer exists, they all got

[00:11:37] Chris: a very original name.

Yeah. They used to,

[00:11:39] Ben: they used to be a few really good magazines in Australia, in the seventies and eighties for electronics because Australia had its own local market. And in spite of its small population, There were a lot of thriving, small businesses in electronics. And they even had in the seventies, when I was a baby, I was born in [00:12:00] 74 Australia, even into the seventies, this had its own electron tube manufacturing facilities.

So they had companies like AWA amalgamated, wireless Australasia that they were making their own transistors and vacuum tubes like valves. We call them. Yes, we're more British than American. But yeah. And so I know I still have valves in guitar gear that were made in Australia, which is awesome. I love that.

That's

[00:12:31] Chris: super cool. I'm always surprised at how many customers we have in Australia, like per capita. Because what is there just like, not even barely 25 million. Yeah.

[00:12:44] Ben: Yeah. I think, I think the last official count I looked at was 22 and there's, that was several years ago. So it's probably about close to 25 by now million people population.

So less than the state of California. Yeah, the whole country. Yeah. It is quite a few electrical engineers there for some reason. I don't know why.

[00:13:06] Chris: Speaking of which, and, and I I've mentioned it on the show before my wife and I spent three weeks in Australia. The end of 2019. I absolutely fell in love. I still have, I've had dreams that my wife and I have.

My wife and I have gone out to Australia, shopping for houses so we can move our whole family specifically to Jarvis bay. Like, oh gosh, that place is beautiful. We fell in love. And we were at, we stayed at this beautiful house and, and we're like, oh, we're, we're like a block from the beach. Let's just go out.

And we, we walk, we walk to the beach and my wife goes oh, we're supposed to have. Apparently there's dolphins in Jarvis bay and, and she goes, let's, let's look for dolphins. I kid you not. We look up and there's an entire pod of dolphins, like, like eight or nine dolphins and they're swimming toward us just like careening toward us.

And my wife just she's fully, [00:14:00] fully clothed, just starts marching into the water, just losing her mind. She's so excited to see. That was, yeah, that's incredible experience of a lifetime. And I was absolutely beautiful, but yeah, I absolutely love the country you come from. I wanted up, I wanted to bring up something that I, I was not aware of.

And, and I guess you started at recently like a live stream, like a YouTube live stream show that you do called and I am I pronouncing this right? That Coriolis. That's correct. Ah, I got, what is that? What, what is it that you're, you're doing there, but I didn't get a chance to watch it yet. Well it's,

[00:14:38] Ben: it's just really fun.

It's something I started with bill hood. And, and I did I did a few pilots about a year ago with him while I was still at Altium, but bill I'd met through hacker day and one of my contacts at Hackaday Sophie Kravitz who I met through Makerfair and other various activities as well. So Sophie put me in touch with bill several years ago and we just completely hit it off.

Bill is an amazing engineer with, you know, he's, he's really kind of a mentor I'd say, and he's, he's not a degree qualified. He didn't go to university or anything. He just knows a lot of stuff. Sure. And his brutal. And he had a career in, you know, he, as a teenager, he became a TV repairman and learned all about electronics through that back when it was all analog and you had to actually do math and it was, it was you had to really think and be pragmatic.

And then, then he worked a lot with with a test and measurement company. And, and so he got really passionate about microcomputers in the early eighties, he was offered an engineering role at Commodore. So he ended up being the primary, [00:16:00] or you could say the lead electrical engineer in charge of the Commodore 1 28, which sold millions of years.

[00:16:07] Chris: No, sir. I had friends I've heard of the Commodore 64. I've never heard of the Commodore 1 28, is it?

[00:16:12] Ben: But like, yeah. So it was the follow up. Well, it was the follow on from the 64. So whoever, whoever had worked on the 64, some of them were still there. A lot of the software and the chip designers were still there.

But as a business Commodore needed to compete because it was the mid eighties and they'd sold tens of millions of 64s around the world. And then IBM released the PC and they didn't want the PC to encroach on a home computer market. So an apple apple had released the two 80 by then as well. And so competition was heating up.

So they decided they needed a computer. That was a really good crossover machine that had everything that the 64 had that. You could play games, you could do fun stuff. You could do graphics and sound and make music, but also had the business side. So the 64, it had a very successful cartridge that was, that had a Z 80 processor in it.

It was the CPM cartridge. Now most of us are too young to have ever really used CPM. I've seen it when

[00:17:25] Chris: I was too young to even know what CPM is.

[00:17:29] Ben: I forget even what the what the acronym stands for, because it was even before my time, because I, when I grew up with computers, I was using dos on a PC.

[00:17:41] Chris: Was it a card inside the cartridge or was it a tape?

[00:17:44] Ben: It was a card, so, okay. So they had the CPM cartridge. It was a PCB inside of plastic. It plugged in the back of the Commodore 64 that had a Z80 microprocessor. And the CPM operating system. And so you could do, [00:18:00] if you were a business owner and you wanted to run VisiCalc or whatever the spreadsheet program was and do your books, you could be after, as you could be using the Komodo 64 for your games and everything, and testing programs written in basic, and in business time, you could plug the CPM cartridge in and reboot, and it would boot to the Z 80 processor and run the CPM operating system, which is a precursor or predecessor to DOS.

Really. And they realized this, this could be, why don't we just put both of these into one thing and sell it, that'll be the new computer and we'll make some improvements while we're at it. We'll improve the process that will improve this. The the memory access will make more memory available.

We'll make it so you can soft switch with a shortcut key or a button on the keyboard or whatever between Z 80 CPM mode and or reboot and you're in Commodore 60 format.

[00:19:00] Chris: There you go.

[00:19:01] Ben: And so Bill was the lead engineer who designed the hardware for that computer and they sold millions of those. I actually remember using one of them at a friend's house in the mid eighties.

I was, I went to stay with a friend who oddly enough lived just outside of Hobart Tasmania. It's a family we knew from Sydney, who'd moved down there and we're running a youth camp area and they had this computer and I went to stay with them for three weeks in the winter time. And we spent a lot of time in doors cause it was cold and they had this computer and it was before my own, before I had my own computer, it was 1988.

I was 13 years. And I spent a lot of time on C 64 games, honestly, 1 28 or

[00:19:48] Chris: so. So this must have blown your mind when you met Bill then like you're sort of like,

[00:19:54] Ben: I was 13 and spent three weeks on the, on his magical creation[00:20:00] doing stuff. And wow. Yeah, it's, it's quite mind blowing totally mind blowing.

And he has so many hero members, all the stories and antiques that went on at a company like Commodore. So our show is with me and Bill and it's just every Friday at 11 Pacific, we start streaming onto YouTube live and

[00:20:20] Chris: 11, 11:00 AM or PM

[00:20:22] Ben: Pacific 7:00 AM Pacific.

Yeah. And it's on bill Hood's channel.

So, so there's a backlog of each episode there sometimes if I can't make it, cause I have a business meeting that takes priority. If I'm away, he'll run it and have a different guest than me. And we just talk anything about electronics that comes to mind, anything about retro computing. Cause we're both into it, anything about you know, PCB manufacturing and the limitations and

[00:20:52] Chris: it's right up my alley.

[00:20:54] Ben: Exactly. All of those subjects to do with electronics and hardware. We talk about just what

[00:20:59] Chris: It also has like perhaps the world's greatest website, name Herdware. I mean that I, when I saw that I go, Bill Herd has a website called herware. He nailed it. He absolutely nailed it. Absolutely. I was trying to think of like, how could, how could Ben, Ben could maybe do something with like air where like, like some, like roping the air Jordan thing somehow,

or a crossing the electronics river Jordan. So I dunno something.

Yeah. That's awesome. Well, that's cool. I, I I've been wanting, I like, I've only seen like a couple minutes of it. Bill seems like a, like a super, super, super cool guy. But I'm definitely going to catch up on it at some point. Yeah.

[00:21:48] Ben: It's a lot of fun,

[00:21:49] Chris: So I, I wanted to, I haven't, perhaps I emailed this to you ahead of time. I'm not sure that I did, but I kind of didn't want to prepare you for this too much [00:22:00] because I like, I like the natural flow of conversations when people aren't totally prepared. One of the things that we try to do with the show and really the whole genesis of the show.

And I'm sorry, poor listeners. You've probably heard this like 30 times now, but it's it started during COVID and we could, we couldn't do tours like we did with you, Ben. We couldn't, you know, and, and we, it, that experience of taking a tour at a contract manufacturer is so fulfilling for people.

Like it's such an amazing experience for people. Who've, who've been ordering circuit boards or designing circuit boards or doing schematic layout or something like that. And then they go to a manufacturer and they're like, oh, this is how it's all done. Like, it all clicks with them, you know? So I wanted to create this podcast where people could really sort of get a similar experience and get that understanding of what's going on to make stuff.

But it sort of started to evolve beyond that. Now we, we have we have an in-house CAM engineer for PCB production. Right? So like he does the CAM work to get the PCBs fabricated. And we realized when we started having these conversations that we could branch out, we could use this platform, this tool to start to have these conversations with people that would never otherwise have conversations.

Right. So for example, you're working on software for designers and engineers. This software is not designed for manufacturers, right? Like, I mean, maybe tangentially it is, but not directly. And it's been

[00:23:35] Ben: longstanding gap, actually, that ECAD was always separated from CAM.

[00:23:40] Chris: Right. Well, and, and so, right. So that's like your primary customer is the designer, your secondary customer is the fab, your tertiary customer.

You're not even a customer is the manual is the assembler, right? Like those guys, those guys.

[00:23:57] Ben: Right. But they have to eat all the data. [00:24:00] Yeah, software and the designer it's right

[00:24:02] Chris: together. That's right. And you give us all the garbage and we have to figure out what to do with it. You give us these legacy formats from 40 years ago that we have to work with.

So I'm kidding. Of course. There's obviously

[00:24:14] Ben: yes, I called Gabba what it is. It's, it's outdated and super limited,

[00:24:19] Chris: but I love it. Like, I love the, I love it the same way that like, some people love, like they don't want to use a fancy, like iPhone to do list manager. They just want to use text files. Right.

[00:24:32] Ben: They just use paper and pencil.

[00:24:35] Chris: Right, right, right. Just a paper and pencil, that's kind of how I feel about Gerber data. I love the rawness and the, and how easy it is to manipulate and work with. And you can get dimensional data so easily off it. There's all these great things about it. But anyway, but I thought that would be having you on the show.

It'd be really exciting because coming from the software design side, the conversations between assemblers like myself. We don't get to have these conversations very often. We don't get to bring up what the experience is like of going from designer to fab, to assembler.

And then of course back up what it's like trying to get conversations to go back up to the the software stack, so to speak. So that's what I was excited about and having you on the show, but also before we get too deep into that conversation that I want to have, can you explain to the audience, because I'm confused as all get out?

What Fustion 360 Electronics is versus Eagle? Because this is when I think of Autodesk and I think of PCB design I think of Eagle. I don't yet think of Fusion 360 Electronics and what's going on there and help us to bridge that gap.

Sure. Yeah. Well, Fusion 360 is kind of as a product.

Broadly speaking is really Autodesk's platform that's helping them move to their business strategy as a big company. Right? So let's just talk about [00:26:00] mechanical modeling for a sec.

So Fusion 360 is the big kahuna today at Autodesk.

[00:26:05] Ben: This is it's one of them.

[00:26:06] Chris: The Microsoft Office, the windows, you know, main primary product,

[00:26:11] Ben: I'd say it's, it's slated to become that.

So Autodesk had inventor as a modeler and assembly, you know, it's 3d CAD for mechanical engineers and design too. It's traditional desktop software. It's really, really good. It's mature and robust in its feature set. But as a company Autodesk's strategy, like many software companies wanted to move to leveraging the cloud and, and making them a far more collaborative workflow.

So all like desktop desktop software for designing anything there was sort of like the first computer revolution when that when IBM released the PC and products like Protel and AutoCAD were launched onto the market back in the dark days. So the first part of that computer revolution for designers was to go from big distributed computing systems, mainframes.

I say not distributed as say centralized, but with multiple users on terminals, right. To their own desktop. That was the first big revolution or disruption in the computer industry. And particularly for CAD.

[00:27:30] Chris: So you don't, you don't want to just sit there and tape out your layout anymore.

[00:27:34] Ben: Right. So also for mechanical design, you know, as computer desktop CPU has got more powerful and graphics cuts and GRA, and GPU's became a thing, you know it enabled really powerful.

And it's along with the same, like you mentioned Microsoft office, we had desktop publishing and all of this kind of stuff and the Adobe suite, and now the final stage of that whole revolution was [00:28:00] video editing computers got good enough. You could do 3d rendering games, video editing just some really powerful stuff.

So we've had really three decades or two and a half decades of the desktop software revolution. Now the problems are not around computing power anymore. The problems are around people have to work in teams, people have to work from anywhere on different devices. People have to be able to, when they're sitting on a train somewhere, realize, oh, I forgot this one thing.

I'm just going to open up on my tablet or my phone or my iPad or whatever it is and make a quick change.

[00:28:43] Chris: Yeah. This is why we use Google docs. And

[00:28:45] Ben: exactly. So, so it's actually good with Google. It was the office suite type software that sort of moved in this direction first because that's the easiest software to do it with.

Now we're seeing other, you know, Platform's doing the same thing. So fusion was launched several years ago by Autodesk as their play to move in that direction. And that's grown, it's matured, it's gone a long way. Five years ago acquired Eagle, which was a classic, you know, desktop PCB tool loved news by many.

I even used it before I worked at Altium more than 16 years ago, more than 17 years ago, I was using Eagle. Wow. The free version for my hobby projects on the sideboards doing software jobs during the day. And so I, I used Eagle version four and five for a while. And, and it was very, very simple, but it did everything you needed for 2d PCB design.

So the, the other piece of this is 3d PCB. It's going back to this collaboration idea. You never designed something in isolation. If you're a company that sells boards as [00:30:00] modules, then maybe, maybe just maybe like if you're a SparkFun or ADA fruit classic examples or seed studio, you're going to design modules and you don't know what kind of products those will be used in by the user who buys them.

And so your only concern really is to make it a nice board that works well and has good signal, integrity, and is as compact as it needs to be, but still be economic. Whereas for most normal consumer products in the world, you have to design them the mechanical design to fit the enclosure, the robotics, whatever it happens to be, you have to collaborate with the mechanical portion, whether you're designing that yourself or whether someone else is.

And so the vision for Autodesk when they acquired Eagle five years ago was always to integrate that into that process, but then also maintain a standard product. And so Eagle, you can still, you can still get a fusion 360 subscription today. And with that, you have the right to download it, install and use Eagle as well.

So if you want to use Eagle standalone, you can still do that today. But the long range vision is that there's, there's a platform and depending on who you are and what job you want to do, That platform will present itself to you with the tools you need. So that includes schematic, PCB, design, circuit, simulation, 3d PCB modeling, and synchronization capabilities.

[00:31:42] Chris: And is this all web, is it all web based?

[00:31:44] Ben: It has a web backend, but it is still today the main fusion software is a desktop software. So you still get the power of the CPU and GPU and it's multithreaded and that's, you get all of that goodness of desktop. [00:32:00] And so before I joined Autodesk they spent they did the hard work and they actually.

Turned Eagle essentially into a software library and integrated it into fusion. So it is the same, it's basically the same tool.

[00:32:16] Chris: A Herculean effort. Yeah.

[00:32:20] Ben: Yeah. Well, apparently you know that they did a lot of work and there were some towards the release date, like a lot of big new software moves. There were nights and weekends and people burning the midnight oil a little bit here and there.

It's unavoidable sometimes with software, but I was visiting the design contract show in 2020, which was at the end of January, I believe. And they had a booth, they had just launched fusion 360 electronics and they had a booth at design con and my friend Matt was there and a couple other guys I knew who had been working for Autodesk and it was a complete surprise.

I thought they were going to be there showing. A new version of Eagle. And no, they were, they're showing like fusion 360 now has ECAD integrated into it. So you can do everything in one tool, which is perfect for me. I'm an electrical engineer. I'm actually a computer systems engineer technically, but I'm a hardware designer, but I also need to make part models, every electronics designer,

needs to make 3d models, at least for your library. Right. Right.

[00:33:31] Chris: I'll interrupt you real quick to give a personal experience with this. When I was, we were redesigning a product for a customer and I wanted to, like you say, see if it fit into an enclosure and I was using Eagle and what was I using?

I think I was using the Eagle. I can't remember what I was using at the time. It might've been Altium, might've been Altium that I started with and. I, I kept asking our mechanical engineer. I'm like, Hey, there's no step file for [00:34:00] this aluminum capacitor I'm trying to use, I don't know what it was. Right.

I'm like, can you model this capacitor for me? And he would model it up and I'd attach it to my project and boom, that I, okay. Can you model this thing for me? And he, and guess what totally used fusion 360. Yeah.

[00:34:16] Ben: And it, because it's super easy and fast to make, especially small models like electronic components.

Once you get familiar with fusion, which is pretty, I've used a few different 3d packages some pretty well known ones and some obscure ones and fusions probably about the easiest learning curve out of all of them for 3d modeling. So even if you just need something for your library

and so, but we've connected that whole process. So the other side of this is steps kind of became the industry standard. I'd say largely in part, because of Altium embracing it in the mid two thousands, we, we launched step support. And at first everyone said, oh, this is a gimmick.

PCBs are 2d and we don't care about the 3d design, but then once they realized they saved many thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars and work hours, not having component clearance problems, the rule checker use the actual 3d shape of the part. Yeah. Then they started coming back and saying, well, this is not actually a gimmick.

And in fact, we want to do thermal analysis. Oh boy. Well, you can't do that if you're using step, that's the problem because you don't get like every component model. Goes out. It's not a body that represents the materials used in the component, right. It's just a shell with surfaces. That's what step is.

Yeah. And CAD package is a pretty smart they'll stitch the shells together and turn it into a solid, but it's just a generic homogenous mass. And the board is the same. It goes out as a step model and you get no information about [00:36:00] the materials that the dielectric, the copper, and so to do thermal analysis still requires a huge setup, time to reallocate what all the materials are and everything.

And and so fusion has that fusion has a equaling, it's in tech preview right now. So not every user

[00:36:20] Chris: So when you're building your, when you're doing your layout of your board, you're going to say. Like, are you literally going to go to like core size and copper weight and dielectric constant and all that kind of like, are you going to put all that information into your, your PCB so that to help with thermal analysis that's,

[00:36:39] Ben: that's where it's heading at the moment fusion has a material library that hasFR4 and standard electrodeposited copper foil build in.

So today we're assuming you're using normal PCB materials, which were 99% of the time you are. And then yeah, you can run thermal analysis and it gives you a pretty accurate results. So that's that, but that's just one example of why you need accurate 3d PCB modeling.

The other side of it is parametrically driven model. I might have a component library where I have power transistors, power fats. You know, switching power supplies or class D amplifiers or whatever, or drive motor drives, whatever it happens to be. And that there's all different shapes and sizes of package within the family and how they come off the tapes and reels and all of that driven by standard JEDEC or IPC parameters, which are in the data sheets.

And so there's a package generator that takes the standard parameters, and it will not only build the footprint to the IPC standard. It'll give you a proper 3d model, not a step file, an actual 3d model, that's native to the core modeling environment. So and then that can be, you could export it as step if you [00:38:00] wanted to use it in a different tool.

So there's a lot of people using fusion, still, even with our library generator that may be using other CAD tools. Still for PCB, but they're, they're using our ECAD library generator because it'll give you the best models of anything. Yeah.

[00:38:16] Chris: So yeah, that makes that's, that's super cool. I have to, I have to check it out cause I still use Eagle pretty regularly.

For various, I don't know, you know what I mean, electronics, we use it. And so I definitely want to get on the, get on the fusion 360 train in and give that a shot. I was thinking about this sort of like, okay. So when I was, when I got started in electronics manufacturing, I was a teenager and I was working at this company that half the business was manufacturing and the other half of the business was PCB layout.

They didn't do any schematic work, not one bit. All they did was PCB layout and. This was like to me, like, okay, yeah, that's, that's how it's done. Right. You have an engineering firm that designs the schematic, and then you have a layout, you know, team that firm that does the PCB layout. And then like when I got in the quote unquote, real world, so to speak, I'm like, oh, actually, and this is fast forward.

Okay. So fast forward at least 10 years. And I'm going, oh, engineers do the schematic and the layout. Like they do both of these things. That's not absolutely true, but that's like this growing trend where they're doing both of them now. And then I, oh, I wonder, is this sort of like, the next step are like, are they becoming mechanical engineers too?

Are they like designing furniture? And you know,

[00:39:41] Ben: There are some, I think by and large people designing electronics consider themselves electrical engineers and yeah. And that there is more and more overlap, but I think they'll always be specialists. Right. And. And just like, once a company becomes [00:40:00] pretty large and successful, they may have dedicated electrical engineers and they have, and it, it made some companies I've spoken to over the years went this way, just because of personal preference of the people on their team.

It's like, oh, we used to all do a bit of layout. We still do occasionally, but this one guy on our team really loves to do it. So we just sort of let him do it. You know,

[00:40:22] Chris: I absolutely love doing PCB layout.

[00:40:24] Ben: Me too. I find it all. Oh my gosh. It is one of the best ways of finding for me flow. It's just such a fun activity.

[00:40:34] Chris: It really is. That's a great way of putting it. I was listening to Malcolm Gladwell podcast. I can't think of the name of it at the moment. He was talking about flow and he was talking about running and how you know, he was talking about race, car drivers, there's all these different conversations about how they get in this, this flow and the way you describe it, like, like time seems to sort of disappear all of a sudden, you know, like most days it's like 1130 and I'm like looking at my watch.

Like, when can I eat? Like, is 12, 12 o'clock yet, you know? But like, when I'm doing PCB layout, it's just like, absolutely the world disappears around me. And all of a sudden it's like three in the afternoon and I'm like, oh, I'm hungry. Oh, I totally didn't even eat lunch. You know, that's

[00:41:18] Ben: precisely what happens to me.

And so I get it. And so, yeah, and the same thing can happen to an extent writing seat code for a microcontroller, but everyone's different, you know, people find flow in different ways. Some people it's a sitting down reading a good, yeah. A good novel and others

[00:41:41] Chris: Or a good Australian electronics magazine

[00:41:46] Ben: and some it's playing tennis.

So we're all different. And, and yeah, I'm like you, Chris, I just laying out a board and solving that, that puzzle that's 2D, but [00:42:00] not2D yeah. Sounds like Shakespeare.

[00:42:09] Chris: Oh man, you, you that you knew exactly how to get me to laugh. That was the most perfect dad joke ever.

[00:42:16] Ben: I am a dad, so I've got a bunch of them

[00:42:22] Chris: that is too cool. And I have to imagine the experience of doing a layout and a fusion 360 is no different. It's probably, yeah, probably a lot of fun. It's basically Eagle, like right. If I am, if I'm comfortable with Eagle, I'd be comfortable with fusion 360 electronic.

[00:42:35] Ben: Yes. You'll, you'll find yourself pretty much straight at home.

There's a few, there's a few key UI differences. Cause you it's, it's wrapped in the fusion platform and UI experience. So, it's and it's had some advancements done that Eagle hasn't had as well. So there's some slightly better routing and polygon management and. And some new things coming in as well, some better schematic editing tools.

And so, yeah, just to look back to my story, how I wound up here, this is why, well, no, don't apologize. I, I thought I'd finished, but it made me realize like, what am I doing? I was an Altium expert for 16 years. Yeah. 16 and a half years. And I, I was well known as that, you know, in the industry

[00:43:21] Chris: You mean Ben Jordan suffers from self-doubt we're not alone.

[00:43:24] Ben: Yeah.

Yeah. And I, and I thought, can I, this will be hard. This will be hard. Cause it's a different company, different tools, like starting again. But I needed, I needed a new challenge and and I, I realized there's a lot, there's a lot to, there's a lot to do, but there's a lot they've already been doing and it's actually it's really powerful.

It's really powerful. So, yeah. So I'm excited about the future. I, I think if, you know, Eage, you'll, you'll be fairly familiar with fusion but there's, there's a lot more coming yet that [00:44:00] the future's bright for, for it as a product. But to get back to you, I just wanted to bring it back to what you said earlier on, about having a CAM engineer in-house and trying to close that loop for manufacturing and this is one of the areas where people need to look.

I don't want to sound too harsh, but there's a lot of printed circuit board design specialists in the world who only want to do that. And I understand it because I love that state of flow while you're doing board layout. We just talked about that. I know you want to swim in that lane and stay there if you can.

And at the same time, There's a lot of inefficiencies in the process between finishing the layout of a board and getting it successfully manufactured in quantity. And you from the EMS, from the contract manufacturing industry, you understand this only, too painfully I'm sure. And so one of the other aspects of having

[00:45:02] Chris: Don't give me PTSD, Ben bring it up,

[00:45:05] Ben: but it's one of the other reasons to have a cloud-based collaborative

it's not just E CAD. It's not just M CAD and it's not justCAM. CAM needs to be there too, but you want to do it all with a collaborative environment where, so with fusion is an example. All my designs are private to me and they're encrypted and all that they're protected. But they're because they're stored on a web backend, they're cached locally.

So per for performance and backup, I can back them up on my hard disk. No problem.

[00:45:38] Chris: It's a hybrid. It's beautiful.

[00:45:39] Ben: In the core of it, we still use the Eagle XML. So they're even an open file format. So there's no reason to worry about losing your data or not being able to use it in the future. Right.

[00:45:51] Chris: That's awesome.

We have that. At the same time, it means I can share a design with you, Chris, if I push a design [00:46:00] from Fusion to CircuitHub I could give you a link, Melissa, or you a link Chris to the design, in fusion team, which is the web interface to this. And you could actually go in there and open the board and draw an area or pick a component and say, this has to move.

You've made a problem for us here. And you could give me that feedback. I'll get an email. So I might be in a different time zone. That's okay. When I check, I'll see that and I can, do you want to visit? I can see your notes. Yeah. So you can red line, you can red line my design essentially through the web interface and tell me where I need to.

And so you can close that feedback loop. That's where we're at today. I think where we want to go in the future is even more automation than that. I'd like the machine I'd like the AOI machine to tell me, you know, you've ordered the wrong, the wrong parts, or I dunno, how do we fix that problem before we even get that far down the line?

Right. So,

You you've sparked this thing that I want to say before I lose it out of my mind here. So I, one of my, you were talking about flow and, and everything. And one of my greatest joys when I design a circuit board is I like to, I like to, okay, what is the limit that, so I talked to my fab and I say, okay, what is your limit for track with and yada yada yada.

And a lot of them will say you know, a good limit is six mil, right? They'll say six mil. They can, most places can go to 5, 4, 3 even. Yeah. But they're going to say six mil and I set it to eight, you know, like whatever is the limit. I just, I just give it a little, give it a little tolerance, give it a little breathing room, give it just a little fluff just to make it a little bit more cozy, cozy, cozy.

I make it cozy, make it [00:48:00] cozy. And then, and then I, so I designed I don't know at least at least like five different circuit boards that we used to make. They were all through hole. And then I redesigned to be surface Mount for our customer. We get zero X outs from our fab, not because we request a zero X outs.

Okay. And so sorry, if you don't know what an X out is, Ben, you might know what an X out is perhaps perhaps not every listener does. When, when a circuit board manufacturers such as ourselves gets a panel from a PCB fab, w we don't get just one board, we get like 10 boards typically, or four boards. You know, it depends on the size of your board, but it's going to be about the size of a sheet of paper, roughly a little bit larger, a little bit smaller, a lot of factors go into it.

But we like to go with 10 up because it's easier to count how many we've built and everything. And typically the more challenging it is for the PCB fab to, to design or to fabricate the more X outs you'll get in that panel. So you order a 10 up panel, you know, two by five, maybe, but in one of them they're going to put a big X with a big, literally a Sharpie.

They're just going to draw a Sharpie all over this one board within the panel. So you really can only build nine boards within this panel. Well, we get, we get these boards. None of them have X outs because I did all my designs very cozy. So there's plenty of plenty of wiggle room on all the vias and the track widths and the clearances.

And everything's just, you know, if my arms were longer, I'd pat myself on the back.

[00:49:28] Ben: That's actually, well, that's why that's when you, when you do CID certification training, the basically the first chapter that you learn in this study guide is about manufacturing capabilities and why they have three different reliability levels and that's matrix with three different reproducibility levels.

So. What you're talking about cozy boards, is that a board that's easily reproducible to within tolerances? Yes. And the X out means [00:50:00] like they tested the board while it was on the panel and it didn't meet your tolerance specifications or, or there was an open circuit somewhere. Cause it was over at store a short somewhere.

Cause it was under etched. Yeah. It's all about avoiding the X outs, man. I agree.

[00:50:16] Chris: So, so what you're saying though, like I love the idea in my mind, I'm picturing an opportunity where that, okay, so here's all right. CAM engineers take your data and you may not be aware of this. Ben, you, you very likely are, but not everybody listening is cam engineers take your data and they change everything.

Like, there's almost no part of your board. They don't touch and modify for their process. And now some of it is, is I don't want to say artificial, but some of it, they, they must modify for their process, but then there's other things that they have to do because otherwise it's on manufacturable and they know what your intent is.

And so they make a small change. Like for example, you have an R one reference designator next year are one location and it's too small. They're never going to be able to print it. So they expand the size of that and make it easier to print and legible. That's a very easy and obvious example, but they do this with your copper.

They do this with your drill and they do this with so many things. A lot of times they'll tell you like, Hey, we want to make this change. Are you okay with it? But imagine normally that just comes to like a Google doc or, or excuse me, whatever. It's an email in a word document. It's like a proper doc X.

It's not even like an RTF for some, let you know, you got to pay your, your monthly feed of Microsoft. So you can open your reports from your PCB fab, but imagine being able to do that. And I swear to God, this is not a puff piece. Ben is not paying me to say this, but imagine being able to do that within the software itself, imagine the cam engineer being able to go in and say, Hey, marked up all this stuff.

Here's all the things we need to change. Are you okay with that? And then the PCB assembler going in and saying [00:52:00] these, these two capacitors, I just ran into this this week, swear to God, ran into this. This week, we had a, we're building 3,500 pieces of this board for this one customer. And these 2 12, 6 capacitors, just keep, they just keep floating into each other to clunk clunk.

And there's just this solder bridge and they keep floating into each other. Finally, I look out and I go, well, they're already connected with copper. They're just running in parallel with each other. So I'm like, Hey we're not gonna, we're going to stop repairing these, like if their bridge, their bridge, but their bridge with copper anyway, are you okay with that?

And the customer was like, yeah, that's fine. But imagine if I was able to go in ahead of time and say, Hey. You got plenty of room here, pull these things apart from each other. And that way there there's going to be no issues here. We're going to be able to solder these fine or, Hey, you've got you've got gang soldermask which hold, and this is, this is a long pet peeve from way back that that we go on about, but solder masking between for new listeners.

You got a QFN and we need soldermask between the pads of the QFN. Otherwise we're going to have bridge city. It's just going to be a big caterpillar of solder. It's not going to be all the little joints you need. For cam engineer to go in. There they go. Yeah, no problem. I'll fabricate that all day at a piece of PCB fab, but then the assembler goes and what are you kidding me?

I, I can't solder that. It's going to be a nightmare. So we want to go in and say, no, we, we need solders slivers or soldermask between all these pads. So we don't get all this bridging that goes,

[00:53:29] Ben: that needs to get fed back to CAD too, because the most CAD tools, most CAD tools, I, the ones that I'm experienced with at least have a default design rules for minimum solar masks live it because the PCB fab we'll use to say our solar mask is film that's laminated, and then photo etched off like just like the PCB etch resist is.

And so it's a certain thickness and there's a limit to the resolution we can do now. That's [00:54:00] different today. Solder mask, the green stuff that protects the board on the top. Is spray painted on, in a very, very thin coating. And then it's, then it's developed. So the re resolution is so much better than it used to be.

The coating is so much thinner. And so you can have, you can have tiny little slivers and broad fabs ought to be able to do it. If they can't, it might mean they're using old equipment,

[00:54:29] Chris: but companies like Autodesk and Altium need to get with the program and to give them the slivers.

[00:54:35] Ben: That's something that I noticed when I joined was that the default rule said they'd updated it to be in more in line with their modern, typical PCB service.

So instead of having a 10 mil minimum trace with a as the default rule, it was five or something more common nowadays. Yeah. So, yeah. Anyway, that is a pet peeve though.

[00:55:00] Chris: Oh yeah. But there's, there's all kinds of stuff like that. I just, I love the idea. You know, if you're, if you're building five pieces and you just need, can I just need to test out this microcontroller is my code going to work?

And I just got to get this going all right. I understand. Not wanting to collaborate with your fab and your assembler, and you just got to get these things made. And, and that's what, that's what we're here for. We do it every day. We do it all the time. But when you're, when you are ordering 5,000 pieces, like an engineering design review is a good idea.

And right now the engineering design review is basically export the Gerber export the X Y we have to program all of our equipment and we look at it all and go, okay. You know, it's not going to, and then the same cam engineer has to do the same thing. He's got an, a loaded into his software and he's got to make all his changes.

[00:55:48] Ben: It's basically, they're using a first article as design review when really it would be helpful to be able to collaborate better with your service providers.

[00:55:57] Chris: Absolutely. And, and [00:56:00] more importantly, like. Why is that not happening today? Maybe because the tools to do that kind of suck or have always sucked, you know, it just it's, they've never, like you were saying, they've never been designed to be collaborative well, and,

[00:56:15] Ben: and PCB CAD was always a separate, it was separated out from cam and they've been attempts to keep those together.

Altium acquired a company years ago called cam testic and built the cam editor. And it's associated DFM checks into Altium designer. But very few people actually even knew it was there, let alone used it. And and it was hard to use and the user interface was backwards compared to everything else.

So it didn't get any traction, mentor, graphics, acquired valor for the same reason. And yet they still find that everyone who knows about valor is someone who works at a factory. Yes.

[00:56:55] Chris: And there's, I know about valor.

[00:56:58] Ben: They've been trying to integrate some of its capabilities into pads so that people can get some of this, but it's software doing the checks for you.

It's not a person with experience. It's not the same. What you really need is a platform. And here's me. I know this sounds like a pitch and I apologize, but I know everyone in our industry knows this is a problem and they're trying to solve it. Yes. And we are too. It's you need a platform that lets these people communicate and collaborate effectively.

Yeah. Yeah. I agree. I get off my soapbox now. Sorry.

[00:57:38] Chris: No, but it's exciting to hear that everybody's working on this. I, I think that. It is heartbreaking really, truly it is heartbreaking when you you know, you go to build something and you're like, Hey, you got a major design issue here, you know? And, and you've just wasted all this money on all this time.

It's, it's, it's terrible. But if you, if [00:58:00] you had an efficient way of, of getting that done ahead of time, it'd be great, you know, but then there's, there's the, this is something that I don't think software tools are going to survive, but it's, it's sort of the human, the human aspect of it. How do you get on the radar of like, okay, When I've finished with my layout, I'm always super nervous when I do this.

But like you click that buy button to get your board's fab, even if it's just like a hundred bucks from OSH park or something, you know, it's like, you're like, whoa, your fingers hovering over that mouse. Like, is it really done? Oh, did I remember to check this one thing? And then you go back, you know, that feeling it's like a super that moment of truth.

But like, imagine if rather than the buy button, there was a please review. And, and there w you know, your fab had a queue of, of reviews to go through and your assembler had a queue of reviews to go through. And obviously I don't want to be overburdened with a thousand reviews to go through, and neither does the fab.

There's gotta be some kind of, there's gotta be a little bit of friction. There has gotta be a little bit of commitment there because when you get a human involved and it's not software, it's costing money, you can hit a DRC a thousand times. Cause it's just a couple of, you know electrons going through figuring this stuff out for you.

But when humans get involved, it gets expensive. But that, I think that aspect of it, you can build all the whizzbang tools in the world, but how do you make sure that you've got the, the, the process flow set up? How do you make sure that you've got a means of, of getting your, your fab and getting your assembler lined up to be able to do that review with you?

[00:59:34] Ben: Right?

Yeah, I agree. I feel like I feel like vacillate on that one. As an industry,

[00:59:41] Chris: It's hard it's human

[00:59:44] Ben: getting boards made when I was new, when I was new to the PCB side of things, let's say, you know, 20 years ago, plus it was an expensive endeavor and a lot of companies [01:00:00] tried to design things as simply as possible, even single layer, if you could.

So that you could, your own lab techs could itch it. In-house and sand

solar reflowed circuit board in, in a GE microwave. And. Have you ever opened a home appliance? They're all single-sided. Yeah.

With phenolic substrates there there's holes. The holes are actually punched, not drilled.

[01:00:29] Chris: Come on. Are you serious

[01:00:30] Ben: for a lot of them yeah. It's crazy. It's crazy. Dirty stuff. We'll tell you. But yeah, I mean, that's how it works. Cause cause getting a double-sided or a four layer board or a six layer board, it was an expensive proposition. And and because of that, you had to, you had to collaborate early with with a applications engineer from the fabricator and it was all kind of cutting edge.

So, so it was a very hands-on process and they were willing to put the effort in because, because. Once an order finally came through, it was going to be for a large production of consumer product that had high value. Yeah. Then it got competitive and it became so much easier for anyone to get it to at least a two layer board, if not four layer six.

And, and so I think, no, that's where it moved towards. We, we don't get as much profit out of this. So we're just going to demand that you submit your design and pay for it. So you're committing, committing to using our services upfront. Then we'll do the review and tell you where it's wrong and you can change it and fix it, but we'll still make it for you because you've already, you've already committed.

But if I were doing a very large production run or [01:02:00] something very complicated, I think any fab worth its salt you know, would spend the time to help me out. They'd be glad to, that's why a lot of fabs went when they're not in lockdown or social distancing mode. Just like touring Worthington, assembly, you know, manufacturing facility, you should tour also PCB fab.

If you can. A lot of them are very happy to give you a tour under the right, you know, social circumstances.

[01:02:29] Chris: Although I will say Ben, I've been on a few of them and I leave just as confused as when I walked in. Like, it is so hard to understand a PCB fab process compare. Like when you walk into an assembly process, you're like, oh, it's then so pick and place.

[01:02:45] Ben: Yeah. Boards, come in here. We'll just put on parts. Reflow

[01:02:50] Chris: it's very obvious what happens. But with, with fab, I was like, I was like, I don't, what is going on? I cannot follow this. So that's why you should listen to every episode with Dave Wilcox because he, it,

[01:03:03] Ben: yeah. Yes. Say it, but it's because it's a process with multiple loops.

So the more layers you add to the board, the more loops it goes through lamination cycles, we'd say, okay.

[01:03:15] Chris: A good way of putting it like that. Like a software loop. It's like a software loop. You've got to put it back through and put it back through and

[01:03:21] Ben: yeah. Yeah. So you, so let's just talk about that real quick.

If I were doing a four layer board, the typical is you start with the two layer pre pre laminated two layer substrate. So that's, that's a hard fully cured, FR4 core. Yep. With copper on the top compromise. It has to get, it goes through a lamination machine that puts the, the blue film on it for photo processing, that's in a yellow room.

Then it goes into direct image, laser

[01:03:57] Chris: direct, fancy fabs have the [01:04:00] direct imaging. Yeah. As we learned in the last episode,

[01:04:02] Ben: absolutely yeah. Maybe not every fab has those. Right. But it goes into the imager, which projects either by laser direct imaging or through through a film projects, the pattern onto the film that's been laminated onto the board.

So there's, this is where it gets more complicated because if the fab does not have a laser direct machine, they have another photo processing process for each film for each layer. Right. That's right. So that has, that has its own crazy, ridiculous process. That was multiple steps. I've been through that too.

I I've even done it by hand way back in the day with 3m wrists on materials, where you could buy, you could buy films, you could buy this opaque, transparent, translucent paint film that lets light through. You put it in a laser printer, you print the PCB pattern onto it. And then that goes into a ultraviolet light box with another film that has a sensitive emulsion.

On one side, you put them together, close the lid, expose it for, you know, 90 seconds or however long it takes. Then you take your laser printed, positive out and you take the other film out and then you develop it with a chemical. Then you rinse it with another chemical and it washes away everywhere where it had been shaded.

[01:05:33] Chris: You literally just stopped. Episode 29, which was like an hour long and like 60 seconds. I love it.

[01:05:42] Ben: Well, I say I used to do it by hand in a small lab and when I was like 19 working at a place. So that was really good experience. Cause it made the whole rest of a PCB fab and the knowledge of PCB design and manufacturing process just makes sense.

[01:05:57] Chris: If you want to like experience this, you like, [01:06:00] you can, there's thousands of YouTube videos, like showing you how to do this at home and like make your own PCBs at home. Yeah. And you'll get a really good understanding. What Ben's talking about and what we talk about with Dave and how to develop everything.

I learned this after our conversation with Dave, because I was like, trying to understand this. I was like, oh, there's tons of people who do this at home. This is super cool.

[01:06:23] Ben: Yeah. Although I will never do it at home ever again for the rest of my life.

[01:06:28] Chris: Yeah. No, I don't, I don't blame you. I don't think

[01:06:31] Ben: no need to do that.

[01:06:32] Chris: Right. Exactly. Like almost, I think the reason you would do it is because you want to experience it. Right? So like for example, I, I brew my own beer. There's zero reason to brew your own beer. Like it is so easy to just walk over to the store, pick up what you want and walk out.

[01:06:52] Ben: And there's so many good ones to choose from.

[01:06:54] Chris: There's so many good ones to choose from. It's going to be delicious. You're going to be supporting a local business. Why do you waste your time making your own because you want to, because it's fun. Yeah. And I would say that's the only reason you should make your own PCB.

Cause if it's fun. Yeah, yeah. Dealing with really like dangerous chemicals. It's great.

[01:07:12] Ben: Yeah. Acids. Harmful salt etc. It's like pure chloride that will eat your concrete. If you drip it don't ask me how I know that. And they'll ruin your clothes too. If you splash it on yourself, your clothes, it's done.

It will have holes everywhere. Next time you wash it, it's just, it's nasty. And it's difficult. It's difficult to do a good job. That's right. The, the processes in a, in a formal factory with the right machinery and software and everything, driving it all, they have everything dialed in almost to the molecule.

Yeah. I mean, a good PCB factories have dedicated materials, scientists and chemists employed by them full time to keep the [01:08:00] process exactly dialed in and to make new processes. When new customers come and ask for a new, a new thing that they haven't done before. So yeah. But it's worth visiting a PCB factory, if you can.

[01:08:15] Chris: Absolutely totally agree. I totally agree. And you were your neck of the woods. There's loads of them out in California. There are so many PCP fabs here in here in the east. We're kind of limited. There's not a whole whole bunch out here, right?

[01:08:28] Ben: It is. I find it kind of odd. It's I, I used to think it's maybe this is still true.

I believe it was because the mill is a lot of military here.

[01:08:41] Chris: Yeah. There's also, I mean, there's Silicon valley, right? Like,

[01:08:44] Ben: yeah, the Silicon valley. It's certainly not the cheapest part of the world to have PCB fabs, but at the same time, fabs have become, they've become far more automated than they ever were.

And so it's more about space having space and what's really impressed me is. There are some fabs that are just really amazingly clean here. This one I know about here in Poway and Southern California is California. That has basically no exhaust.

[01:09:19] Chris: Yup. Yup. There's there's one in in not Vermont, New Hampshire.

They, they claim their claim to fame is that we use far more water in our bathrooms than we use our manufacturing process and our fab process. They're really efficient at, at saving chemicals in

[01:09:36] Ben: water. Yeah. And they, they, they have all sorts of electroplating and, and amazing processes that recycle materials.

[01:09:47] Chris: That's right. So that's right.

[01:09:49] Ben: Yeah. They reclaim a lot.

[01:09:51] Chris: If listeners aren't, aren't familiar, like I've been in some, into some older PCB fabs in their. Disgusting, like absolutely disgusting, [01:10:00] just like everything's rusting and corrosion everywhere and just it's nasty, nasty, awful place to work. And then that's why, I mean, no surprise.

They struggled to hire people and of course consumer demand for lower prices, everything went overseas less restrictions on chemicals and waste and yada, yada, yada, you can kind of understand why that started to happen. But now that like you were saying, Ben, it is becoming more automated.

We are starting to, like, I've heard of a couple PCB fabs starting up in the United States. Like this

is going on. It's good. Yeah. Yeah.

[01:10:34] Ben: It's very re"ashoring" news.

[01:10:36] Chris: Oh, Hey Ben, the dad strikes back. I love it. All right. So I. I mean, we could go on and on for hours here, but I think it's, I think it's probably probably worth first of all, making sure that you've, you've talked about any particular subjects you wanted to talk about.

I, I got mine out there. My, my thing I wanted to talk about was the opportunity that manufacturers have to collaborate with software design companies and keep these conversations going. But if you have nothing further we can get into the greatest part of the pick place podcast show that being the pet peeve

[01:11:16] Ben: let's do it.

[01:11:18] Chris: So before you get into yours, Ben because I'm a microphone hog, I have to, I have to have a followup with a previous pet peeve, probably my most popular and, and epic pet peeve of all time.

[01:11:30] Melissa: It's your follow up to your follow-up I think

[01:11:32] Chris: follow up to my followup alert perforated poll tabs on cardboard boxes. I have found. I have officially found a perforated pole tab on a cardboard box that worked.

I kid you not what it exists. It exists. It is the Nespresso. Hang on a second. I had to add to actually the Nespresso, not the virtuo boxes that like the regular coffee capsule, [01:12:00] the espresso boxes. There are these long rectangular boxes and they open on one end and I have a screenshot and a link to these things.

So you can look it up in the show notes, but these things actually work. The perforated, you, you pull it open and it pulls open properly, right along the perforated edge. It is life-changing I can't like there's a, so not only here's the best part about this. Like, I was excited that I discovered that there is a perforated, like cardboard box that actually opens properly.

But what, what was even more exciting was that when I was searching for an image to share about this, it brought me to probably my favorite website in the world right now, which I think I closed the tab. Oh, it's packaging world packworld.com. It's called, it's like, it's all about product packaging. And it is the nerdiest thing in the world.

You got to check it out. packworld.com, packaging engineering, and, and I, and I bet you a package engineer who works there would not come up with these crappy pull tabs that come on, all these, you know, macaroni and cheese boxes that are just, just ridiculous. They don't work, but anyway, but somebody at Nespresso knows what Mo knows my pain and solved it.

[01:13:14] Ben: This is actually a really cool website pack worlds. They've got all sorts of articles on robotics, you know, factory robotics.

[01:13:22] Chris: Yeah. Right. It's it's gone way beyond just the cardboard box. How do you actually, how do you package the package now? Yeah.

[01:13:29] Melissa: Coming to a future episode or the pick place podcast talking to the founder of packworld.com.

[01:13:37] Ben: You know what it's appropriate given pick and place, pick and place is just a tiny little, a much smaller version of. Packaging factories. Probably. No, I don't want to trivialize it. It's, it's way more than that, but

[01:13:53] Chris: I tell you what I tell you, what I saw. I went to in a previous life, I used to sell welding equipment and I went to Stanley Bostitch.

They [01:14:00] make but they're huge brand. They made a lot of tools and nails and stuff. Well, I went to their nail factory and they, they had this giant robotic arm. I mean, 16 feet tall, probably. And it would pick up these heavy boxes of nails from a rolling conveyor and then stack it on a pallet. And that's all these things did.

And then they wrap the pallet and then the pallet got pulled away and they're like, oh, here's our pick and place machines. I'm like that. Ain't a pick and place machine. I know, pick and place machine, but it's funny. There's, there's, it's a very generic term that we have we've built into this microcosm of, oh, it must mean electronics manufacturing.

It's like no pick and place machines. This broad thing, but anyway, we're getting, we're getting back to electronics. We're not here to talk about electronics, which we're here to talk about pet peeves. So bring it on.

[01:14:51] Ben: Oh, pet peeves. You know, I have so many of them, but I almost don't know where to start.

I'll tell you. I'll tell you. The first one that comes to mind though, is I really appreciate a brand new, fresh non-stick pan for cooking. Oh. And you know where I'm going here for sure. I feel like I'm the only person on the planet who respects the nonstick surface. I'm the only one who uses non-metallic specialists.

I don't cut. If I do not cut food in the pan while it's cooking. If it needs, if it needs cutting, it should have been cut already. I'm sorry. Well, you cut it after it's cooked.

Absolutely bonkers and it's nothing to do with electronics, except that I do have a frying pan set aside just for single sided. Foldering I love it. And it is non-stick and the only harsh thing that'll ever touch it is a printed circuit board that's laying flat [01:16:00] in it.

[01:16:01] Chris: Now, do you put sand in it? Do you play sand in it?

[01:16:03] Ben: I haven't actually tried that. Haven't done

[01:16:06] Chris: that. Yeah, because if you put place sand in it, then you get you can get it even, it can conform to the PCB better. Cause you might get a little warpage in your pan, but you can get that PCB settled right in the sand and the sand will transfer the heat nicely.

[01:16:19] Ben: Wow. Okay. This has been very eye opening and expanding to, to join you guys. I'm learning a lot today. This

[01:16:29] Chris: is great. That's it place that Chris's tip of the day, play sand in your single-sided PCB reflow

[01:16:35] Melissa: Do you have a preferred non-stick pan?

[01:16:39] Ben: I just used one actually in an Airbnb. And I'm trying to remember the name of it.

Cause I want to get one. If I was in an Airbnb last week on vacation and oh my gosh, it was like amazing, super high quality. And, and instead of the copper or black sort of charcoal colored nonstick coating, it was almost white. Oh, interesting. And and I just, it had a fancy name and the other family that was staying with us, we, there were two families, mine, and this other family, friends of ours, we were on vacation together.

And that the other mom and the other family seems to know, I'm like commenting on it and she's like, oh yeah, those are blah, blah, blah. She knew the name and everything.

[01:17:29] Chris: You know, there was somebody screaming into their radio right now, you know, like trying to tell us

[01:17:34] Ben: it's like slip stone. I, it was like slip stone, but it was not slip stone.

It was a different brand, but similar to slip stone. And I've got to rediscover it somehow. Cause I've forgotten what it was. I didn't write it down.

[01:17:49] Chris: So Ben, what I love about your pet peeve is that I'm that guy, I'm that guy who's like that ehh grab that spatula, you know, just pick it right up. I'm making eggs in them.

And then my wife is the one that comes over. What are you [01:18:00] doing?

[01:18:03] Melissa: Yeah, the thing is I had, I, well, I have an All-Clad nonstick pan. I did all the things I hand washed. It only didn't use any metal on. It was so careful.

[01:18:15] Ben: So that's, that's another. Yeah. And that's another roommate.

[01:18:19] Chris: Cause you have a roommate.

[01:18:21] Melissa: No. Everyone knew you do not do these things to these pen and it's still got scratched. Yeah.

[01:18:30] Chris: Yeah. That's true. Now, what is that? What is that coating? Isn't it? What's that stuff definitely on Teflon right now.

[01:18:37] Ben: Rogers 3000

[01:18:39] Chris: that's I was going like, okay, so this is, so this is what I'm getting at, like Teflon. No, you remember Melissa when in the early days when we were getting manufacturing, going for circuit hub, we had a a vapor phase reflow oven recall this and the fluid that went in it Rehno did some research.

It was liquid Teflon. Basically. Remember that. So like

[01:19:08] Melissa: and you're cooking with that

[01:19:10] Chris: but it's, but it's, but it's like, they put it in makeup too.

[01:19:14] Melissa: Right. They also have it on dental floss, dental floss. How's it coated on there. Oh

[01:19:18] Ben: yeah. To make it slip through your teeth.

[01:19:21] Chris: So my, like, I've always heard from people that like, oh, you don't want to ruin your non-slip pan because then you're going to ingest this dangerous chemical.

And I'm like, I don't think it said dangerous. Like people are rubbing it on their face and flossing their teeth with it. I think it's probably okay.

[01:19:37] Ben: Probably helps everything get through the system. You know,

[01:19:42] Chris: now it's a proper, now it's a proper podcast sound to fix everything.

[01:19:46] Ben: That's the dad coming back.

[01:19:51] Chris: Well, that's great. That is a Ben. That is a quality pet peeve right there. That is quality. Making sure to use plastic. You know what [01:20:00] it is too? Not all plastics are equal. There's there's tough plastics out there. I can see it. I could see a plastic spatula messing up a Teflon coating all day. .

[01:20:09] Ben: Yeah. Teflon's not hard. It's it's it. Well, I dunno know how do you classify it? It's a soft, it could be,

[01:20:19] Chris: could even be liquid. It can, as we

[01:20:21] Ben: discovered. Yeah. It's like, that's why it's hard to use PTFE materials and get good reflow results because the whole thing expands tremendously through reflow and it's it's, it's like a big pile of bubblegum on the way through.

[01:20:39] Chris: We've had pretty good success with it.

[01:20:41] Ben: I think the materials will come a long way though.

[01:20:43] Chris: Yeah, we do a lot of rodgers and yeah. It's not that bad it's it's we, at this point, we almost don't even treat it any different than Fr4 it. Like you've got a profile a little bit differently, but it's like, it's, it's pretty forgiving.

Now. Maybe they, like you're saying maybe the materials science have come a long way and helped prevent the stretch and shrink that happens in a reflow oven or very likely the designer knows what they're doing and they're not using parts that would suffer from too much tension.

[01:21:11] Ben: And it's also the last deck in a a lot of the time you only need a thin Roger's pre preg on the outer layers and the rest can be

[01:21:21] Chris: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yep. That's very, very, very true. Very, very true. Yeah. That's a whole that whole, okay. When you start to talk about our, I we've had some RF engineers come into our shop before and they start to explain like their design. You, I mean, I could not be more confused when they start to I'm like, oh yeah, I have no idea what you're talking about right now.

Like this is so beyond my scope of understanding. Yeah. Those guys, the RF guys are off the charts. Absolutely. Off the charts.

[01:21:52] Ben: The savant of PCB seriously

[01:21:55] Chris: say, oh, that's good. That's good. You know what his, his, his oh, I [01:22:00] forgot his name. Is it, is it bill herd, right? Yeah. Does he do any RF stuff?

[01:22:05] Ben: Yeah. He's done a little bit.

It's not, it's not his main thing, but he has done a little bit. He can do it if he can do it. If someone asks him to yeah.

[01:22:13] Chris: I feel like I want to, I want to like call him the savant of PCB, you know?

[01:22:16] Ben: Yeah. He's, he's brilliant. He's certainly a savant of of digital and mixed signal system.

[01:22:24] Chris: The handful. So check out check out Bill's website, check out the name of the show.

Again. I had the, my notes in front of me ,

Coriolis effect. And we have a website Coriolis, C O R I O L I s-effect.com. And there's a discord. If you want to chat with us, there's a interesting group of people they're working on their share projects. They're working on. Just talk about nerdy, electronic stuff all the time.

It's wonderful.

That's great. I think it's going to be right up the alley of our, our listeners

[01:23:01] Ben: and you should get bill I'll tell him he needs to come in and be a guest on this podcast too. He's a great guy to talk to. He's got a lot of grace.

[01:23:11] Chris: Absolutely. Are you kidding me? That would be epic. I'd absolutely love it.

That would, I would be thrilled seriously. I would. It'd be like, like after, so as you were discussing the Commodore 1 28 and everything, I was kind of like, I was listening, but I was also kind of Googling in the background, the history of it and everything. And, and it, that your experience of being 13 years old and using the Commodore 1 28, and then later on meeting, you know, the lead, whatever of the, of the design of it.

I was thinking that would be like me meeting, like Miyamoto, the designer of, of Mario and Zelda and cause that's what I grew up

[01:23:51] Ben: I was blown away and even more blown away that he's just a humble, nice, super nice guy. Yeah. Real friendly and was interested [01:24:00] in doing a show with me. Like I'm like, yeah, cool. I thought you'd be too busy, but this is, this is awesome.

[01:24:07] Chris: He's got an amazing looking lab, by the way, like he's. I could just like a tower of, of meters and scopes and everything behind him in his lab. Yeah.

[01:24:15] Ben: He's got a lot of nice gear he's collected over the years and got some good deals on some of it and then donated other things and he's, he's just, he knows what to do.

[01:24:26] Chris: Nice. That's awesome. So yeah, check out. Coriolis effect, checkout fusion 360 electronics and and tour a PCB fab. Yeah. I think that's what everybody should walk away from this with. Yeah, definitely. Great. Well, thanks so much, Ben, for being on the show. I just, I was, I've been so excited to have you on I'm glad we were finally able to make it work and a good time.

[01:24:48] Ben: Yeah. Thank you.

[01:24:49] Chris: Email us anytime. contact@pickplacepodcast.com or tweet at us at. Or at w assembly we'd love to hear from you.

[01:24:59] Melissa: Thanks for listening to the pick place podcast. If you like, what you heard consider following us on your favorite podcast app, and please leave us a review on apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks guys. Thanks Ben.

[01:25:13] Ben: Thanks you guys.

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