How often does something you put together work first time?

[5321488]

 

[srce]

No 0% option? 



Even your poll is a fail. 

[TheAmmoniacal]

Yeah, needs a 0% option.

[Miyuki]

How to count if it work like a firework 

[IonizedGears]

If something works on first go, it just means I haven't tested it enough.

Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk

[Seekonk]

I just built something and forgot to make one connection.  This lead to an interesting result.  It is now a selling feature of the product that can be switched in and out.  Just like code, the faster you can bang something out the better.  The sooner you get something put together and playing with it the better.   

[rmacintosh]

Just built and tested an EEPROM I added to my project.
Absolutely did not work first time.

Or the second, 

Third time was a charm 

[xani]

All the time, it just works. Just it doesn't work in a way I wanted to. Others call it bugs, I call it accidental features

[Ice-Tea]

My company's called FTR&F

First Time Right & First Things First

But yeah, 0% option required 

[Mr. Scram]

Works as in gives signs of life, works as in doing kind of something that resembles the final goal or works as in doing exactly what it should do?

[ajb]

Never, if there's software involved.

(These days, there's usually software involved)

[maginnovision]

100%. After some testing I find things could be better though and do it again. That's about... 40% of the time. MCU works but oops footprint is wrong and the data line got connected to a ground. Video amp works but the SD lines are backwards. Everything works but had to run wires because the sram footprint was 50% the length it was supposed to be. I get 5 amps but the lack of a tvs diode causes the controller to be fried when connecting to supplies less than a few hundred USD.

💯

[David Hess]

Up until a certain point, every project required significant rework.  After that point, every project at least recognizably worked.

[tszaboo]

Last time I put something together it was a sandwich and it worked for me. Otherwise, I design stuff, not banging rocks together. The last mistake I made was swapping MOSI and MISO on an SPI bus on a prototype, and it had to be bit banged. Who cares, we correct it for the second prototype.

[Buriedcode]

Most of my career would be about 10% but in the past few years its shot up.  This is mostly because I'm doing simpler projects, and I have become better at testing/debugging on the fly (as I'm sure we all work in a modular way).  And of course, using MCU's, if one has built up their own software libraries that have the bugs ironed out over time leads to less traps.

But I agree with some of the comments - depends on what you mean by "work".  If you have a vague goal, such as "light this LED if I get a signal from something" then chances are it's going to be easier to achieve than "get 32 wireless devices on a mesh network in the field".

Aside from quite simple projects, does anyone just knock something up without simulations or tests and power it up without checking anything first?  I would have thought most of us would have done that perhaps when we were starting out, but quickly learned that breaking the problem down into smaller parts, that each can be tested is a more reliable and quicker way to achieve a goal.  This greatly increases the chances of things going well first "power on".

[jpanhalt]

I don't give it the option of not working.  Simple.

[Mr. Scram]

Last time I put something together it was a sandwich and it worked for me. Otherwise, I design stuff, not banging rocks together. The last mistake I made was swapping MOSI and MISO on an SPI bus on a prototype, and it had to be bit banged. Who cares, we correct it for the second prototype.

You're a braver man than I am, spitting in Murphy's face like that.

[rdl]

Almost never...

[ucanel]

%10 generally.
%50 If it is very simple circuit.

%0.1 magic smoke.

[Rerouter]

Comes down to how long I sat down and went over all the stupid things that could go wrong before ordering the boards,

My last 5 big projects have all worked out of the box (40-280 components), with minor cosmetic issues, e.g. a screw hole not giving enough clearance, or no indicator for what way the programming header connects.

My last 5 hobby projects have had issues, but learnt enough about some weird reactions that now I have a new profitable project coming up.

[Cyberdragon]

I left a project working for months untill it started acting funny. I noticed it started and died when shaken. There's very few components (lots of wires though) so I though it was either the pot or a bad solder joint.

How about a missing solder joint. Good thing it was on the low voltage side not the mains side.

[IanB]

Generally when something doesn't work as designed it is because there is something you didn't properly understand about what you were doing.

As you get older and gain more experience the percentage of things that work first time grows ever closer to 100% as you learn more and more about how things work.

You have to distinguish between designs (that are supposed to work) and experiments (where you don't know what should happen and you are exploring). However, it is often said that failed experiments are just as valuable as successful ones. Every experimental result increases your knowledge.

[cat87]

Almost never. Whenever I make a small circuit on perf board,  if I think it's going to take me 1 hour to put together and make it work, that means it usually takes half a day.  Murphy likes to get his nose into my business.

[Mr. Scram]

Generally when something doesn't work as designed it is because there is something you didn't properly understand about what you were doing.

As you get older and gain more experience the percentage of things that work first time grows ever closer to 100% as you learn more and more about how things work.

You have to distinguish between designs (that are supposed to work) and experiments (where you don't know what should happen and you are exploring). However, it is often said that failed experiments are just as valuable as successful ones. Every experimental result increases your knowledge.

"Things work first time when you have more experience" and other lies we tell ourselves.

[TheUnnamedNewbie]

It depends on the type of project, and in what setting. At home, sure, I often have stuff that doesn't work first time. But when doing designs at Uni, many of our chips work first time, but that is because we spent months simulating them. The performance might deviate a bit for analog designs and such. Our RF amplifiers are a special case though, since there we often push past what the simulation tools can do and need to start mixing multiple tools (3D EM solvers and SPICE and ...) and can't simulate the entire design because it would be too complex.