[US] Seeking participants with Eagle knowledge to participate in a user study

[jgarzagu]

Hello,

I'm Jorge Garza (J Garza), a Ph.D. student at the University of California, San Diego, and we're doing a user study on a schematic capture prototype we developed called TypedSchematic. TypedSchematics (based on Eagle) is a tool with a different approach and workflow for connecting reusable schematic designs, also known as schematic blocks. The intent of the study is to compare the integration of schematic blocks for creating new schematics between Autodesk Eagle and our tool TypedSchematics, as well as to evaluate the schematic model representation of both.

We are seeking people with Autodesk Eagle schematics design knowledge and basic hardware protocol interfaces (e.g., I2C, SPI, Serial) knowledge to participate in a research study. The study will be run fully remotely using Zoom where you will be asked to complete a schematic design using Autodesk Eagle and then using TypedSchematics.

The Zoom session will last for 1 hour and will be scheduled based on your availability. Be expected to screen share an Eagle window during the session. After the session, you will be asked to complete an online questionnaire that takes approximately 25 minutes.

Your participation will be of great help to us in evaluating our tool, apart from giving you knowledge of current research that is being carried out to improve electronic design tools.

To thank you for your participation and feedback, you will receive a $40 Amazon gift card.

Interested participants have the option of reviewing an informative instructional video of our tool prior to the study:
.
 
If you are interested in participating in the study, please contact me: jgarzagu at eng.ucsd.edu.

System requirements:
A computer (desktop or laptop) with a touchpad or mouse capable of running Zoom and Autodesk Eagle (Free Version)
(*Note: Our system currently doesn’t support touchscreen inputs).
Microphone and Speakers
 
* Note: This user study has been approved by the IRB and is limited to people living in the US.

Thank you !

[jpanhalt]

Autodesk has stopped development of Eagle ("deprecated").  Have you considered using for comparison a program that is current and may remain in the future?

[jgarzagu]

In replay to jpanhalt,

Thank you for your question  .

As far as I know, Eagle and most of its futures have been integrated into Fusion 360.

TypedSchematics uses the Eagle file format on the backend using our own framework for manipulating Eagle files. Eagle and Fusion 360 files are compatible, so our tool can also work with Fusion 360, which is active.

However, for the user study we are not expecting participants to pay for Fusion 360, so we have selected Eagle because it is free, but anyone who wants to use Fusion 360 instead is welcome to participate in the study.

We would like to incorporate other PCB CADs (e.g., KiCAD), and we also want to add PCB blocks, so you can create PCB designs very quickly, which was the main goal. Something we already have achieved in another tool in a different fashion -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I315VCho9jw. But currently we are limited by financial resources and time. Which translates to `I'm the only developer and I'm running out of time to graduate` .

[twospoons]

Just when you thought schematic entry couldn't get any worse ...

[jgarzagu]

In replay to twospoons,

Thank you for your honest critique . I think there may be a misunderstanding of the tool due to lack of broader context and lack of time on my part to post detailed documentation. I admit the entry may looks quite different at first but has its advantages, however the schematic entry is not the main focus of the tool, the main focus is reusability and sharing of schematic blocks. You add reusable Eagle schematic designs to the tool with and additional syntax, hence *typed* schematic. The benefit of having this syntax is that constraint validations can be enabled every time you try to make connections. This way, when others try to use your blocks, the block will be safe from connection errors, as well as providing more information.

This tool is designed to be used in a community environment and is more similar to Altium's Upverter layout https://upverter.com/ with the added benefit that the integration of the different schematics blocks can be done automatically, although we are missing the PCB side. You also don't need to wait for the tool's maintainers to add blocks for you, you can add them yourself. Another similar design, in a certain sense, would be Sparkfun A La Carte https://alc.sparkfun.com/.

TypeSchematics is a tool for rapid prototyping and generation of schematic templates which relies on existing CADs, not a new Schematic / PCB CAD.

BTW. If anyone has any feedback, I'm happy to read it here or via email, it would help me improve the tool.

[devinatkin]

A very cool idea. I could see this being functionally useful for people who do consulting and have a lot of relatively similar project types. Doing 500 projects all essentially different plays on the same theme great you can save time and simplify the process of schematic reuse.

This looks very similar in theme to Dip trace's hierarchical schematics which I've been making progressively more use of. At least that's what I'm most familiar with.

If it ended up integrated with that software I'd welcome it happily. Especially if it included some good version management. I'd love the ability to verify and track the usage of specific blocks so that I can integrate those sorts of designs more effectively. For instance with the power supply system in the example. It would be nice to have the ability to track and annotate different versions of the schematic such that I could say track if I've verified the schematic worked on a board. Sort by power output capabilities, BOM cost, with layout integration, layout area.

Again I can only see it being useful for people doing a lot of mostly the same designs, but that's not an insignificant number of people, otherwise things like favorite microcontrollers/ power regulators/ transistors wouldn't be a thing. While I can see where the pessimistic people are coming from, I think it's a great first step towards something incredibly useful. On my to learn list has been PCBHDL, I have a friend who as I see it needs ~500 different boards designed, but each one is really similar, but can't be made to be the same. Including integration to allow these blocks to be connected with something like a PCB HDL language could up its usefulness quite a bit to those people.

Wish I could participate in your study unfortunately it's been so long since I've used Eagle that I'd be pretty well useless.

[twospoons]

I'll be more specific about what I dislike here:
Too much abstraction leads to a lack of understanding.  The lego brick approach is all very well, but is heavily reliant on your i/o description being accurate and able to account for interactions between blocks.  The horribly fragmented schematic that was generated in the video is another barrier to understanding,  tracing nets across schematic snippets makes both board layout and fault finding very difficult.  This is a pet peeve of mine - I see this all the time where ppl draw a bunch of opamps scattered across a page and link them with net labels. Its impossible to get a good sense of the circuit flow, which is critical to good board layout.

The example video was pretty simplistic - what do you do when your microcontroller needs 4 different power supplies? What happens if you put too many loads inside your regulator block? What happens if you put too many loads on your GPIO?

[SiliconWizard]

Just when you thought schematic entry couldn't get any worse ...

Eagle bites already, but this... 
I admit I didn't have the patience to watch more than a few sec of the tutorial though. But I can't see the point? Haven't been able to even understand what it was supposed to bring? And there is no description on the web site itself either, which kinda looks like a playground. https://typedschematics.com/ 

[Bud]

@ jgarzagu , you need to start from improving the sound quality , it is Absolutely horrible ( with capital A), i could not watch 10 sec of the video.

[eecook]

Hello jgarzagu,

As someone who has been working with PCB design for many years and always working on similar designs I absolutely see the value in what you are doing. Not in the current form though, but a mature tool that allowed to do this would be highly valuable. If you want to capture the attention of seasoned designers you would need to impress them. To avoid relying only on subjective opinions (and to gain confidence in your approach) it may be a good idea to set up benchmarks, i.e how much time would it take an engineer to complete a professional design with your tool vs with an existing tool? If you can address this specific question for a family of designs (say battery powered IoT sensors) your case would look more solid.

All the best,
-Simon.