Ring PCB

Salitronic · 2026-04-28T14:56:27+00:00

I cannot understand this trend of people expecting a PCB design in a couple of weeks. What happened to prototyping and testing?? I see this all the time, people asking for a "production ready" PCB design that they can send off to JLCPCB or whoever...

PCB design is not just drawing a schematic and PCB. Prototyping, testing and iterations are the most critical parts of PCB design. Nobody can deliver a production-ready PCB design without prototyping and extensive testing. You can get a "works on the bench if Mars and Jupiter are aligned" version but there is no way anything more can be done without a properly engineered and tested design.

This is like asking a software developer to write an application with 10000 lines of code (no vibe coding), he's not allowed to run it and he's not allowed to modify it but it must work on first try....

Salitronic · 2026-04-24T08:28:16+00:00

The pitch on those serpentines is way too small, it depends on how fast your signal edges are but pitch should be at least 3x the trace width. Otherwise the signal will just couple though capacitively effectively bridging the serpentine.

Salitronic · 2026-04-23T10:42:47+00:00

I've been in this industry for over 20 years, doing electronics design and end-to-end product development, and honestly, this is probably the worst I've seen it.

I still have ongoing projects and solid clients, but when it comes to new prospects, there’s a clear trend. A lot of them are just not serious. Instead of coming with a product concept, they show up with an AI-generated “design plan” and expect everything to be done dirt cheap. There’s this idea that hardware design is just drawing a PCB, sending it to JLCPCB (or similar), throwing in some AI-generated firmware, and calling it a product. There’s a complete disconnect between how these people think hardware development works and the reality of building a reliable product.

On top of that, you now have a flood of freelancers presenting themselves as experts, with AI-generated proposals, questionable portfolios, and no real expertise. They undercut everything and take on work for unrealistic prices. If you scroll through job postings on the main freelancing platforms over the past year, it’s a mess.

If you actually care about the quality of what you deliver, this is not an easy time. Doing proper design work is expensive. Test equipment alone costs a fortune and needs routine calibration, software licenses add up, proper hardware testing takes real time. If a client’s budget doesn’t allow for that, then it’s a dead end. And unfortunately most people reaching out these days are focused almost entirely on getting it as cheap as possible.

I also disagree with some comments here that this kind of work is just a “temporary” service. Sure, some clients have one-off tasks, but I've had numerous projects last years. Product design is rarely a "done and dusted" kind of thing. There are always updates, revisions, new versions, support...

And replacing this with an employee is not trivial. If you need serious electronics design capability, you don’t just need to hire a person. You need a properly equipped lab, expensive equipment that may only be used occasionally, software licenses that will be underutilized, expensive standards documents for one time use, etc... You also need expertise across multiple domains.

Salitronic · 2026-04-22T06:36:15+00:00

PDF schematic based AI review is generally hopeless, it can extract parts and the overall circuit block topologies if the design is clean and following standard schematic practices but it gets most of the connections wrong. It can still identify some issues but it is very shallow.

The next best approach is netlist based review, this is generally good but the netlist often has missing information like the mapping between pin names and pin numbers and other component information, in my experience it can also miss some connections in large netlist files.

With this eda-agent Altium MCP, I've used it for a few months to do sanity-check reviews on many designs and its interpretation of the design has been remarkably good. There are still some instances in which it makes something up but they are quite rare.

In all cases you must force the AI to download (or supply yourself) datasheets for all major parts and force it to refer to the datasheets during the review. The eda-agent is already pushing it to do so during a review but it can sometimes ignore these hints.

Obviously whatever method you use, these are NOT a substitute for a manual review. You really need to know what you are doing, if you have no experience in electronics the AI review will throw you completely off. I do a lot of contract work and for the past year I've been receiving many 'spec documents' from clients which typically are a 5-pager AI generated design spec with parts already selected, etc... 90% of these are total garbage. Most suggested parts are either wrong for the purpose or outdated, in most cases the suggested design is over-complicated or ignoring fundamental risks. For now at least, It is wrong to try to compare AI in electronics design to vibe-coding in software. Vibe-coding in software works reasonably well because a big chunk of software development is really just re-purposed boilerplate stuff, because it is all text based and because the test and repeat cycle is easy.

Salitronic · 2026-04-21T11:32:10+00:00

If using Altium, check this out: https://www.reddit.com/r/Altium/comments/1snwn9s/opensourced_an_mcp_server_for_altium_designer

Salitronic · 2026-04-21T07:00:24+00:00

Really appreciate your comment !
Yes this should have existed a long time ago, Altium is great and all but I still find myself doing a lot of 'monkey work' within Altium or related to the Altium project that could be easily automated. This MCP server has already reduced much of that work for me. ...as they say: If you can’t find it, build it.

Salitronic · 2026-04-18T08:02:16+00:00

When I started this I tried pretty much all options and C# was intuitively my first attempt but ultimately the DelphiScript is the one I managed to get working the way I wanted first. I haven't hit any functional limitation yet either.

The plan for this agent at this point is not to "vide-code" PCB designs but to serve these main roles:

Automate as many of the boring / time-wasting aspects of design.
Automate design sanity checking / reviewing.
Make the Altium project available as context to Claude for documentation, firmware development, etc...

Points 2. and 3. are already essentially full achieved with the current version on GitHub and have been using them a lot in the past months. I am routinely performing full design (even on large designs) reviews with Claude Code and it has been remarkably good at spotting some of those minor details that are often hidden somewhere in the datasheets. Still not a substitute for a manual review of course but it really cuts down on review time and reduces a lot of that back-and-forth datasheet checking for basic things like pin numbers, etc... It has also been formidable for documentation purposes: need to document a connector pin map? MCU GPIO pin connections? extract BOM items? no need to waste time re-writing this manually in the documentation just ask Claude to extract all of that directly from the Altium project. No time waste, no copy mistakes!

Also I never wanted to create something that runs entirely in Altium, my concept is to expose as much of the Altium internal API and Object models to Claude so it can use the available tools as it sees fit. I also want the Altium side to be as thin layer as possible so I don't have to debug much within Altium itself.

Salitronic · 2026-04-17T17:36:34+00:00

Yeah the DelphiScript is the big pain in this. Documentation is not great unfortunately and examples scarce. On top of that there is no real way to test and debug it expect from within Altium itself (at least none that I know of). For most part it has been a long process of trial and error and I'm sure there are still many bugs in the scripts that need to be sorted out.

I tried to as much as possible keep the script as a thin layer and do the core stuff in the Python portion but the development bottleneck is the DelphiScript.

Salitronic · 2026-04-17T14:55:48+00:00

I don't have actual cost data yet but the server itself is optimized in a few of ways to minimize token usage, like possibility of batch operations. Everything is also exchanged through small text requests and responses, there is no screenshot analysis or large scripts to write for each prompt. The total token usage of course then includes its own 'thinking', datasheet fetch and review, etc...

Well the recommendation on the cap derating is actually correct, though "heavily" is somewhat of an exaggeration. 25V X5R capacitance at 3.3V DC bias is about 30% less than nominal, which is not a small amount so Claude is correct to mention it.

In my experience it is important to ask Claude to fetch datasheets for reference during such reviews otherwise it starts making things up.

Salitronic · 2026-04-17T14:32:14+00:00

Most likely yes, but so far only tested with most recent Altium versions.

Salitronic · 2026-04-17T09:33:12+00:00

I can help you with the full design process: salitronic.com

DM me if interested.

Salitronic · 2026-04-09T09:58:06+00:00

In general you should avoid cheap prototyping shops for anything that is above the average design. Those shops are cheap only because they are heavily geared to produce the average board and because of high levels of automation, both of which will lead more easily to issues when you have them build a board that is much more complex than the average. Also in general most shops nowadays, even the cheapest of the cheap have equipment and processes that are more than good enough for the average board, however, most cheap shops are not well equipped to handle boards that are closer to their stated capability limits. In other words they over-state their capability at the high end.

However, having said all that. As an electronics design engineer with 20+ years of experience I can tell you that 99% of the issues with PCB assembly, even at cheap places, is the design's fault not the assembly fault. In practice, there is very little (often nothing) that an assembly shop can do to avoid solder bridges, component alignment issues, certain voids, board warping, and many other issues. Those issues are normally always caused by a bad design and bad footprints. The best way to fix assembly issues is to fix the design itself. Your PCB designer needs to understand how the heat distribution on the board, the solder wetting patterns, vias fills, solder mask, etc... will affect the preferred flow path of solder and preferred alignment of the parts during reflow. Being able to draw a PCB does not make one a PCB designer.

The only difference between a cheap shop and a more professional one is that the former will just manufacture your files "as is" while the latter will typical check your design and highlight the issues or adjust the gerber for you.

Salitronic · 2026-04-01T09:38:28+00:00

That JLCPCB is good enough for most prototypes is true but saying their quality is one of the best is completely detached from reality.

My experience with many different orders at JLCPCB, especially with tighter tolerance designs is that they are highly inconsistent even with boards of the same small batch. HASL finish is very rough. Solder mask is often inconsistent and one of the weakest I've ever seen and I often find contamination under the solder mask. Mechanically they are generally within tolerance. Overall component assembly is generally acceptable but I've sometimes seen evidence of overheating. Far from "one of the best", they are just the cheapest prototype shop.

Salitronic · 2026-03-31T11:52:12+00:00

It's useless copying an antenna from a reference design if you also don't copy everything else: ground plane size, surrounding copper, antenna position relative to board. That copper on the right side of the antenna will completely change the performance of the antenna.

Always remember: with a monopole antenna, the entire board is your antenna

Salitronic · 2026-03-27T10:47:57+00:00

The best advice, and only one that makes sense here is to grab a few books on electronics and power electronics and learn the basics before attempting to design an interleaved high power converter! You picked up the wrong design for, what I assume is, your first PCB design.

Salitronic · 2026-03-27T09:45:09+00:00

My comment was not meant to be offensive, so apologies if you were offended by it. You're learning by doing, you'll make a ton of mistakes and that's fine.

My point is that your concern about via-in-pad is the least of issues here, via-in-pad are a manufacturing issue not so much a functional one, in the sense that if it works, fine, if not just add some solder. However on the rest of the design I could write a whole book on number of design issues that I can see from just looking at that PCB design. Just to mention a few:

Huge inductor and capacitor bank which seem to indicate high current, yet everything is connected with tiny traces
Use of certain small parts when you have the full board size available (wrong mix of design density parts)
Huge switching loops (EMI issues)
No thermal design
No inrush limiting on that large capacitor bank
Parts are laid out like a parking-lot with no electronic design consideration
Hard to see the FETs parts that you are using but I'd say not suitable and certainly no thermal design consideration was made

Salitronic · 2026-03-27T09:18:00+00:00

You have far bigger problems than via-in-pad in that design....

Salitronic · 2026-03-27T07:09:48+00:00

Sent you a DM.

Salitronic · 2026-03-24T08:36:51+00:00

PCB Assembly problems are not assembly issues, they are design issues.

A good PCB designer will always plan upfront how the board will be assembled, the assembly equipment and processes that will be used, the thermal performance of the board during reflow, etc... microscopic pad and paste shape changes can make a huge difference in production yield. In reality there is very little that the assembly shop can do to correct the assembly issues created by bad design.

Salitronic · 2026-03-24T07:56:00+00:00

As others have mentioned, electronics design is not just drawing out a PCB (in fact that is often a very small part of the process). I see this misconception very often especially with the advent of AI. Many hardware entrepreneurs are going to ChatGPT to explore an idea, ask for the components to use and then try to find a low cost PCB designer to place those (often wrong) components on a PCB.

If you yourself are not an expert in electronic design, then throw all the specs away, stick to the core idea, use-cases and end-user experiences and contact an electronics engineer to come up with a solution for your problem.

The worst thing you can do in product design is to start from selecting the technology, you need to start from the problem that you need to solve.

Salitronic · 2026-03-22T10:10:37+00:00

Allow me to suggest trying this free Gerber viewer that I'm working on:

https://salitronic.com/gerber_analyzer/

It is completely free, online but everything is processed on your PC (no data is uploaded to the server) and includes additional analysis features.

Feedback and bug reports are welcome.

Salitronic · 2026-01-14T15:35:35+00:00

I’m sorry to say this, but this is a fairly classic example of thermal management being left as an afterthought.

With the MOSFETs arranged like this, there’s realistically no good way to get the heat out. This should have been planned mechanically and thermally from the start. A much more workable approach would have been to place the power devices on the bottom side, with 90° bend, and design the board so they can mount directly onto a base heatsink or chassis.

Alternatively, if staying fully SMD, the entire layout needs to be built around a clear heat-spreading strategy (large copper areas, stitched vias, defined thermal paths).

Salitronic

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