I do hardware (sch/pcb) design in spain, I’m in a lead position in a small company.
When I look at what I’ve built, I have experience with technologies that most of my college mates are still mystified with (e.g. DDR4 or x64 architecture).
Most electronics in europe are industrial/power electronics, and most engineers spend their days doing what amounts to paperwork. In contrast I’ve had to ship new designs on a biweekly basis to keep things afloat, I’ve had to set up databases to keep track of our parts (something most hardware engineers don’t even understand), I’ve had to write reliable python scripts since our build process depended on it... the list goes on.
From my experience interacting with US engineers, you don’t even realize how little some “Engineers” in the old continent actually know.
Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronic and Amp Hour fame? Boy I better not screw this up! :D
Bad news: I use Altium
Good news: I’m trying out kicad on my spare time (feel free to take the credit)
As to the question, Altium is quite flexible in regards to using a database as a library, but it is riddled with bugs, workarounds and generally weird stuff. I’ve tried from the extremely simple to the overly complex. In that order:
- Easy level: Excel files on a shared NAS.
Pros:
* easy to set up.
* easy to convince management to try it out.
Cons:
* Not really a database
* You need to close Altium to add parts (this is very frustrating during sch capture)
- Medium level: Acces database (mdb) on a shared NAS
Pros:
* easy to set up (not as quite as excel but similar)
* you can add parts from inside Altium itself (with limited input interface)
Cons:
* because of how buggy Altium is the database tends to get completely corrupted. Almost daily backups are mandatory.
* You need to set up a form for part management, directly editing the mdb files is a path to disaster even with as little as 2 people.
Insane level: SQL server on AWS. Conected to local LAN through VPN. A simple php CRUD on apache for management.
Pros:
* Can handle heavish loads (a T2 micro can support about a dozen hardware engineers working in parallel)
* should be more scalable
* hides a lot of the complexity of the database for the junior engineers.
* small sized NAS won’t suffer while someone is generating a BOM.
* changes to database are more manageable if someone on the team knows sql.
* more reliable and resilient to altium bugs
Cons:
* No internet connection means no one works.
* possibly the most expensive solution
PS: I’m on my phone, I’ll reformat stuff when I get my pc to make it more legible
I do hardware (sch/pcb) design in spain, I’m in a lead position in a small company.
When I look at what I’ve built, I have experience with technologies that most of my college mates are still mystified with (e.g. DDR4 or x64 architecture).
Most electronics in europe are industrial/power electronics, and most engineers spend their days doing what amounts to paperwork. In contrast I’ve had to ship new designs on a biweekly basis to keep things afloat, I’ve had to set up databases to keep track of our parts (something most hardware engineers don’t even understand), I’ve had to write reliable python scripts since our build process depended on it... the list goes on.
From my experience interacting with US engineers, you don’t even realize how little some “Engineers” in the old continent actually know.