:::RHMT::: Real Home Made Turbo
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: Tim on April 24, 2009, 10:50:01 AM
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Fuck there is no point I'm not looking for anything just venting don't read it unless you're bored and like to read useless shit.
I am a tear shit apart and see how it works type of guy, not real big on computers. Self taught solidworks 3d CAD 'designer' for my company cause back when I was in college for engineering I dropped out to build houses. Fast forward to a couple years ago I hired a guy to design a computer board and power supply board for my company. He's an old school vietnam vet who describes his war as 'getting an affliction to smoking that sticky green stuff over there and lost a couple decades to drugs once I returned'. (funny retired guy that can do some cool old school shit with analog circuits that make some of the current guys in the field scratch their heads why it works so well) I hired a high school buddy part time to write the code and this old head with failing health designed the hardware and hand wired a couple developement boards to test the theory and such.
Old guy ended up in the hospital and the friend got a full time Job for a large corperation 6 hours away. It's ok I learned a decent amount about electrical circuits through google while old guy would end up in the hospital for short stays during the design project.
We have functioning program and hardware now we need the real deal. I hired a large corperation to take our schematics that were hand drawn by old guy on graph paper, and make them a digital complete single page per board schematic. Then once we checked this we had them lay out produce and populate a 6 layer smt pcb board for the microcontroller, and a 2 layer through hole board for the power supply. As the old guy was in the hospital and the software guy moved away I was left to explain what I wanted and oversee interfacing with the manufacturing of these boards.
I get an addiction to chew and a huge kick in the electronics knowledgeabilities as the boards didn't work when delivered. It took insane hours painstakingly tracing component to component with a voltmeter to find all of their mistakes like 3 inputs combined sharing the same trace, all transistors layout out with the wrong footprint (and not all of them the same wrong footprint), all Diodes reversed, the bridge rectifier was layed out improperly. A couple of the voltage regulators were layed out with the wrong footprint. Their response was I approved the silkscreens for the boards!?!?! If I wanted to have to check every single line on a 6 layer tiny surface mount board myself i would have paid an intern to lay it out for $2k instead of paying this company $20k!!!!! I got into a pissing match with this company as they expected me to just fix each board like I have nothing better to do running a small family company experiencing growing pains. I won they patched the boards and the rep won't look me in the eye now that some hick that blinked an eye in confusion when we first met with respect to electronics schooled him with what he taught himself on the internet at night while designing and manufacturing an entire line of equipment during the day.
Revision 2. I documented in a 4 or 5 page document every single mistake they made and how to fix it. Once they did I printed each layer out on transparency paper in a different colored ink, then hired a friend of the families with a full time job to check over every single trace in the evenings. (sounds fun) He caught a couple minor glitches but eventually approved that the board matched the schematic. I recieved 30 boards the beginning of this week and 25 DON'T FUCKING WORK!! I had to teach myself a small amount of code through reading other examples and from what i've picked up watching my friend troubleshoot and last night I wrote a program to make it easy to test every single input and output on these boards. It removed all the complexity of our machine software and displays exactly what inputs it thinks are active, what outputs it is making active, and what inputs its looking at to make the outputs active. 19 of the boards can't even be programmed and of the 11 that can, 6 have weird issues where inputs never turn off even though I confirm the 5V has dropped to 0V, outputs come on and never go off or go off randomly after a few minutes even though I confirmed the input trigger voltage is no longer present.
HOW THE FUCK DO COMPANIES STAY IN BUSINESS AND EXPECT ME TO PAY FOR USELESS WORK I HAVE TO TEACH MYSELF AND DO OVER? THEY EXPECT ME TO TRACK DOWN WHY THESE BOARDS DON'T WORK CAUSE THEY DON'T WANT TO LOOK FOR A NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK? I don't understand I went to professionals so that I could hand off one aspect of this business I know nothing about and know it would get done correct. Now I've wasted countless thousands of dollars and God knows how much time teaching myself as a hack from the hip i should have spent to send myself back to school and done it right the first time. I would at least have a better fundamental understanding of electronics instead of this mediocre know enough to fuck shit up and sometimes make shit work fogginess I call my experience. If you want something done right you have to do it yourself is all I've learned from the last 5 years in this business.
That is all, no cliffs go fuck yourself if you wasted your time reading about my shitty life. I just want to drive to this companies office and start sniping these useless fucks. I was working til midnight last night (pattern of the week) instead of with my fiance and 5 month old son trying to get ready to meet with these fucks only for them to tell me they don't have the resources to look at them right now and to get back to them once I have more details and narrowed down the problem.
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I have no idea what you said but that sucks.
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You know it is 100% true that some of these people just blow someone off , untill said person explains there fuck ups in a more experienced way. then they finally do some real work, and your lucky if that even happens.
i feel for ya, this would totally suck
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Eh i've calmed down alot and am trying to remove emotion from it.
2nd look they might have gotten a batch of bunk chips in and maybe the problem is not their fault this time. I don't really know how to test what exactly the problem is but their past track record of fucking up simple things like populating 3W resistors with 1/4w or putting 100k ohm resistors instead of 100 ohm helps to make a hothead like me jump to fuck these lazy fucks mode. And you think they would have some sort of quality control other than a 'visual inspection'. Next time I order these boards I'm supplying the test pogram I wrote as well as a step by step instruction on how each board is to be tested prior to leaving the factory. Fuck dumping this diagnostics shit on me.
I'm just pissed 25 of my 30 boards are useless pieces of shit sitting on my desk and I need 20 to ship current orders or be fucked. I also have other fires that require my attention instead of dealing with this shit.
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You know it is 100% true that some of these people just blow someone off , untill said person explains there fuck ups in a more experienced way. then they finally do some real work, and your lucky if that even happens.
i feel for ya, this would totally suck
The funny thing was they blew me off about fixing the first fuck ups saying they didn't want to have to nit-pick who was at fault and since it was only my time to fix them it would be easiest for me to fix it. I rightfully offended him when I told him I knew nothing of electronics, but a chimp with google can easily download datasheets and see that half the components were wrong compared to the schematic, whether said chimp could understand how the components interact and function or not. It is the track record of elementary mistakes that has built up to this point where I boiled over facing this 83% failure rate.
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Tim, you need to contact other electronic hobbyists about which PCB companies do or don't suck. I had Moatsie and Blundell steer me towards barebonespcb for prototypes and 4pcb for final revisions. I'm not doing anything complex like you though.
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Yikes, that's a hell of a shitty situation you're stuck in tim. What's your dads take on all of this?
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who the fuck is this retard :o
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The funny thing is JD is it really isn't a complicated board. a few 24V conditioning circuits, encoder, 16x2 LCD, couple ADC channels, a DAC and a bunch of configurable 5V inputs/outputs, and the essentially the entire USBMOD3 FTDI dev board I found way back off the original pgmfi wiki incorperated for communications. There are some cool tricks the old guy tried to explain to me that make the analog conditioning circuits stable and linear all the way to each end of the 0-5V sweep but other than that it's really straight forward. But all of the errors they've made in the past were absurd.
The old man's been out all week banging out as many sales meetings as he could. He's trying to get in with a few companies that would need a couple hundred of these boards :noel: :yes: I just gotta make sure I don't fuck up these timelines and get our reputation for being late bad enough to become a problem.
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Lack of give-a-shit is a poor trait to carry.
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wow, I lack the ability to understand most of that post other than your getting fucked. Sorry to hear it.
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You might want to look into running a Linux Os. At lease for programing, main reason is there are better(free) programs to program in that tell you where the problem is in the coding.
Hit me up if you can't find what you need.
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http://www.gpleda.org/ (http://www.gpleda.org/)
"These tools are used for electrical circuit design, schematic capture, simulation, prototyping, and production"
Tell me how it goes.
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The funny thing is JD is it really isn't a complicated board. a few 24V conditioning circuits, encoder, 16x2 LCD, couple ADC channels, a DAC and a bunch of configurable 5V inputs/outputs, and the essentially the entire USBMOD3 FTDI dev board I found way back off the original pgmfi wiki incorperated for communications. There are some cool tricks the old guy tried to explain to me that make the analog conditioning circuits stable and linear all the way to each end of the 0-5V sweep but other than that it's really straight forward. But all of the errors they've made in the past were absurd.
The old man's been out all week banging out as many sales meetings as he could. He's trying to get in with a few companies that would need a couple hundred of these boards :noel: :yes: I just gotta make sure I don't fuck up these timelines and get our reputation for being late bad enough to become a problem.
Your old vet guy sounds fucking awesome. Let me kno if my lesser talents can be of any help.
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kicad
pcb
xcircuit
cad-like circuit board creation programs; available through synaptic in Linux. BTW there all FREE!
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I use OrCAD v16.0, it's free also.
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I appreciate the offers guys. These rants kept me from being a total asshole but I made sure to let them know I needed functional boards by the end of the week. I shipped the non functioning boards back today and will see how it plays out. I'm going to make them test all the boards that get 'fixed' though before they even waste my time.
After the 2nd batch of this PO (will make 60 total) are gone though I'll deffinately be looking into the vendors you guys recommend. Do you know what kind of quality control they use, functionality testing or just visual component placement and solder connection checks?
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How in the fuck does a fab shop make wattage and orientation errors? That's crazy.
DIPTrace is pretty nice for CAD too. They have a free version with up to 250 pins, and a lite up to 500 pins.
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I'll stick to the juarez version for $0, Alex.