Work from home as PCB designer?

[shoppy]

Hello,

Great work for the youtube channels, I really enjoy watching them.

I have electronics knowledge and I played with PCB design a couple of times, do you think that it is feasable to work full / part time as a PCB designer from home?
Are there sites lyke "Rent-A-Coder / Freelancer" that specialise in outsourcing PCB design projects?
(Is there a standard as how such a project should be outsourced(electrical schematic, fooprints, etc)?)

[AndyC_772]

Yes, it's certainly possible to work as a freelance PCB designer, and there are plenty of design bureaux out there which do precisely that.

The difficulty, though, is that if you've "played with PCB design a couple of times", you're a long way from being able to take on other peoples' jobs for money. You need to first find yourself somewhere to train, to get experience, to learn the skills you'll need before you eventually set yourself up as a business.

Have a look for PCB design services in your area; good ones may be expanding and looking to take on junior design engineers. Failing that, plenty of electronics companies design their own PCBs and may be able to give you a job.

I don't see any way to get the experience working from home, though.

[hagster]

Do you count PCB design as seperate to circuit design?

I would guess that most companies that have already designed the circuit are willing to put in the extra couple of hours to layout the PCB.

[AndyC_772]

I certainly would. I regularly design boards that take a week or more to lay out, and they're small and simple compared to the jobs I was doing ten years ago.

[tszaboo]

PCB design is more than just doing schematic and layout.
PCB is usually not the end product, it is a mean to make something work. Which usually means it also needs mechanical design, firmware, software.
And that means meetings and teamwork. Also, if you work as an EE the board has to be brought to life, tested, you usually need a lot of equipment to test everything.
That being said, if you specialize in something like layout, find a lovely company, maybe you could do 50% teleworking.
But for this, I would say the first step is to become that specialist. That takes time. Thousands of hours.

[mikeselectricstuff]

The sort of companies that are big enough to want someone to do just PCB design are probably big enough to do it in-house.
A lot of PCB design is experience and stuff that is hard or impossible to teach - sounds like you don't yet have the experience.
It's also rather too important to trust to some random rent-a-coder site

[shoppy]

Hello guys, thank you for all your kind answers.

What I understand by "PCB design" is that you do the component placing and trace routing starting from the electric wiring diagram and list of component packages.

Yes, it's certainly possible to work as a freelance PCB designer, and there are plenty of design bureaux out there which do precisely that....

Do you have some website or just point out what keywords I should use to search in Google?

[AndyC_772]

Imagine you're an engineer with a schematic you need laid out. What search terms would YOU put into Google? Do they yield the result you'd hope for?

If so, there's your answer. If not, there's a clue to help you design your own web site and get hits from potential customers.

[T3sl4co1l]

I've worked on a lot of jobs where the client has a basic schematic, perhaps pasted together out of odds and ends from prior products.  They want the design checked out, finalized, PCBified and manufactured (at least for protos).

It seems to me, the design checkout step may often be omitted from the RFQ, but it would be in poor conscience of me to ignore a circuit that has obvious problems.

A recent case, the client was inexperienced with Altium, and made numerous connectivity errors by assuming Port and Net Name objects are equivalent.  Easy enough fix (convert ports to net names and off-sheet connectors).

Size of the organization doesn't really matter, it's if their engineering staff are experienced and committed to quality.  A company that is normally dedicated to manufacturing a given product, has little need for design engineering -- one or two guys to handle maintenance activities is enough.  A company that's constantly innovating will have design engineers working all the time, and is more likely to have good quality.

Keep in mind, both cases are a business opportunity (give or take your quality of work).  One needs engineering, when they infrequently design a product; the other needs engineering, when they infrequently need more hands on a job.  (Engaging a contractor to fill in missing labor is a great way to keep tight project timelines.)

As for PCB freelancing, I've seen plenty of "professional" designs more goofy than some amateurs.  Not nearly as bad as beginners to PCB design, mind, but there is plenty of opportunity to grow there.

Tim

[Old Printer]

There is also the interaction of components and traces on the board. As a hobbyist I don't have any formal training, and as such over the years I have been surprised to read about how adjacent components can negatively effect the circuit. PCB layout goes far beyond the convenient and pleasing placement of parts. Even after a formal education in electronics there is a lot of experience required to know what to, and what not to, place near what on a board.

[shoppy]

I'm not saying that it's easy or that I don't need any electrical engineering background, that is not the problem, I totally agree with you.

I was hoping for a simple answer lyke "that's a bad ideea, don't do that" or "it's a good ideea, here is a good place to start, see this lynk / google this out".
(hope this is not bad etiquete)

[Old Printer]

I'm not saying that it's easy or that I don't need any electrical engineering background, that is not the problem, I totally agree with you.

I was hoping for a simple answer lyke "that's a bad ideea, don't do that" or "it's a good ideea, here is a good place to start, see this lynk / google this out".
(hope this is not bad etiquete)

EE is the wrong forum for simple answers, it's not in our genes     but never let that stop you from asking.

[Bud]

My friend, if you think of PCB design is as a simple "placing component and connecting them together", you are very very far from the reality.

[free_electron]

The big thing is : what CAD packages will you support.
Anyone looking for outsourcing layout is going to run on one of the big 3 : Altium ,Cadence or Mentor. They will send you the database  : you run the routing and they will expect the routed file back. And for complex boards they may want you to have specctra as well ...

There are plenty of companies that do contract work for PCB layout.

Typically outsourced falls in two categories
- stuff that is simple enough it doesn't need babysitting and our internal people are better tasked at more complex stuff
- stuff that requires very specialized know-how and tools ( like Specctra)

[tszaboo]

My friend, if you think of PCB design is as a simple "placing component and connecting them together", you are very very far from the reality.

Yes, I always say: that part of the job, a trained monkey can do it. It's just connecting two points together with a line, without the lines crossing. Right?

[cdev]

Eventually, AIs, given enough contextual information, should be able to grok more and more of those rules and implement them.

[james_s]

Maybe some day, but I'm not holding my breath. I've tried out autorouters now and then and every time I found I spent more time screwing around and got inferior results to if I had just laid it out manually to begin with.

[marcuswilson007]

I would not trust anyone without years of audio experience to layout audio boards for me.
I have seen many audio kitset boards (also many commercial products) with serious layout errors.
Modern audio devices are such that a designer needs to understand DC, low frequency and RF engineering principles to layout good PCBs.

[Alex Eisenhut]

Do you count PCB design as seperate to circuit design?

I would guess that most companies that have already designed the circuit are willing to put in the extra couple of hours to layout the PCB.

"couple hours" 

 

What kind of companies are these???

[james_s]

I would not trust anyone without years of audio experience to layout audio boards for me.
I have seen many audio kitset boards (also many commercial products) with serious layout errors.
Modern audio devices are such that a designer needs to understand DC, low frequency and RF engineering principles to layout good PCBs.

Gotta start somewhere, nobody is born with years of experience. I've seen terrible boards laid out by engineers who had years of experience, and some really nicely done boards by people who were relatively new at it. It's something that needs to be judged on a case by case basis.

[T3sl4co1l]

Eventually, AIs, given enough contextual information, should be able to grok more and more of those rules and implement them.

Thing is, will the incremental cost of AI development actually go to zero, or asymptotically settle out?

After all, there is ultimately some cost of energy to computing such a solution, even for ideal quantum computers.  (We are probably centuries away from reaching the information-theoretic limit.)

The question is, can that cost be low enough that it is worth doing, relative to the cost of the conventional approach?

It may very well be that analog circuit design is not automated, in my lifetime, simply because it's not a big enough problem to justify its expense.  And its customers are disparate; there is currently no market where customers can pool their purchasing power that designers must compete for.

There's also the matter of trickle-down economics.  Some technologies trickle.  Three decades ago, no one could imagine affording a computer and CAD system, out of pocket.  Now we have free tools (like KiCAD) that run on absurdly affordable platforms (like a $100 used PC).  That worked out nicely.  On the other hand, it's been over half a century, and IC manufacture has still not made such a transition -- the industry secret sausage is still carefully maintained behind NDAs, and manufactured behind $10k+ NREs.  (Yes, there are some cheaper fabs, but nothing hobbyist level, not by a long shot.  In contrast, small PCBs are cheaper than a meal.)

Which history will apply to these technologies, when and if they are developed?  Only time will tell.

Tim

[tszaboo]

If you think about, how much companies are paying for the layout designers, I can see it being automated within a decade or so. Autorouters are getting more and more intelligent. You can fan-out a BGA with a click in newer versions of Altium. The scary thing about machine learning is, that you dont need that much human interaction, after the setup is made.

Now, this is the situation now:
Auto routers can route a board.
Length tuning and other optimization is not that difficult to do.
Component placement can be automated.
Digital simulation is a solved problem, high end solutions are capable of providing useful feedback.

So it is not unconceivable to set up a machine learning algorithm to learn placement and routing.

On the other hand, PCB routing is an NP complete problem. Which means, that increasing the connections to be routed, the time doesn't increase linearly, more like exponentially (kinda, sorta). Throwing more hardware at the problem is definitely solving it though, since stuff on the PCB costs money, thus it will not get infinitely complex (like IC design is going now).
You would still need the engineer though. To set up the board size, connectors, schematic, footprints, general guides to steer the AI.

But imagine a company, with access to a small supercomputer (or cloud provider), doing overnight PCB layout consulting...

[T3sl4co1l]

But imagine a company, with access to a small supercomputer (or cloud provider), doing overnight PCB layout consulting...

Yech, who knows if it's even correct?  Just sounds like an opportunity to waste more money.  How many prototypes will you spin (minding that an article of the above imagined situation will run >$10k to fabricate and assemble) before realizing you should've had an engineer sit and look at it for a few days, first?

I laugh at "machine learning".  Possible to improve it?  Certainly.  Possible to do better than a squishy meat-brain?  Without a doubt!  Is anyone even trying that?  Hell no.  Current tech is only statistical pattern matching.  Which one of those thousands of nets is wrong?  How will you know?

For sure, combining algorithmic assurance with machine learning heuristics is the next frontier.  But how long will that take?  A decade, or what?

Tim

[tszaboo]

Which one of those thousands of nets is wrong?  How will you know?

By wrong, I assume you dont mean wrong connection. I will assume you mean excess EMC or reflections, or other signal integrity problems.
The thing is, who knows? I dont simulate the connections that I route, because software costs $$$. I know it is possible to avoid a lot of problems, if you simulate it, so the  computer already has the advantage. And I saw so many bad designs throughout my career, I wouldn't be surprised, if a computer can make better results than that.
I mean I saw boards, where an RNG generator can probably route it better.

And the computer can do route->simulate->route->...->route->simulate-> "ah, that is how it works" ->  route -> acceptable result. After it learns it.

[cdev]

They will figure out a way to have the users do the refinement of the software, unknowingly. I'm sure this is already happening somewhere. Probably in multiple contexts. When we consider the amount of boring tasks which machines are exceedingly well at doing, or are passable at doing but getting better quickly, our entire way of looking at society and work is not long for this world. Virtually every profession, skilled or unskilled, will be impacted by automation within a few years, some more than others. I think this will be one of the ones that is heavily impacted. Not overnight, but within a decade from today.

I say this having seen a similar process impact architecture and construction via a friend who works in that field. Twenty years ago, they were already almost there with buildings. (Of course, lots more money (per project) was involved there.)

IMHO, this problem, technically, is similar enough to that one to seem likely to be driven by a similar dynamic. Very high end tools that do these kinds of tasks well probably already exist, but are not widely used because of cost. possibly cost of the hardware as well as software. But just as with everything else, due to rapid improvements in technologies like cluster computing, the price of solving very complex problems will come down.

Eventually, AIs, given enough contextual information, should be able to grok more and more of those rules and implement them.

Thing is, will the incremental cost of AI development actually go to zero, or asymptotically settle out?

After all, there is ultimately some cost of energy to computing such a solution, even for ideal quantum computers.  (We are probably centuries away from reaching the information-theoretic limit.)

The question is, can that cost be low enough that it is worth doing, relative to the cost of the conventional approach?

It may very well be that analog circuit design is not automated, in my lifetime, simply because it's not a big enough problem to justify its expense.  And its customers are disparate; there is currently no market where customers can pool their purchasing power that designers must compete for.

There's also the matter of trickle-down economics.  Some technologies trickle.  Three decades ago, no one could imagine affording a computer and CAD system, out of pocket.  Now we have free tools (like KiCAD) that run on absurdly affordable platforms (like a $100 used PC).  That worked out nicely.  On the other hand, it's been over half a century, and IC manufacture has still not made such a transition -- the industry secret sausage is still carefully maintained behind NDAs, and manufactured behind $10k+ NREs.  (Yes, there are some cheaper fabs, but nothing hobbyist level, not by a long shot.  In contrast, small PCBs are cheaper than a meal.)

Which history will apply to these technologies, when and if they are developed?  Only time will tell.

Tim