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.