Hello everyone. Thank you for attending this presentation. My name is Arnaud and right now I'm a senior software engineer at Colabora. So I'm mostly a software guy doing low-level development regarding canal drivers, bootloaders and all the basic stuff. And mostly in embedded software fields. Prior to that I used to be a couple years ago the owner and only person actually at Hawaii Implification which was my small company. I was designing and building custom tube amplifiers for guitar and bass guitar. This was actually my first real-world experience with electronics design and that's why I got interested in the first place in the EDA tools and all the free software tools about that. So I would guide you from going from the ID to the prototype using free enterprise software and just fixing some little thing here. Sorry about that. There should be better. Sorry. So going from the ID to the prototype, I'll walk you through a sample workflow which is actually my workflow for designing new electronics device and I'll show you along the way a few software I use or intend to use or just heard about which are all free software of course. So first is testing and validating your idea, getting sure everything will work and should work. Then you have the PCB design itself and finally you can build a case for your project using mechanical CAD tools. So for the first part the first questions you have to ask yourself when you have a new idea might be innovative or just a new take on all the classical circuit is can it work.  It's about theory and electronics understanding and the basic rules. So you have a first idea if it can work in theory the thing is will it work with how you intend to implement it. And in that case you have of course the calculation you can do but you have also the simulation tools which are really important and I guess there are two main simulation tools available in free software too. There are QX which is a Qt one and based on I don't remember the engine name exactly but it's not SPICE and you have NG SPICE which uses the classical SPICE tool for simulation. I don't really have any experience with any of them because I'm not really using more simulation but the thing I can see here is that NG SPICE will allow you to use one of the many models of SPICE devices you can find on the internet. In case you need to use some kind of exotic component in my case it was electron tubes which are not really widely used among the electronics community right now you have tube models for SPICE but you don't have one for QX I guess. Then you can draft your schematic so of course you can use a full-featured DA but you also have the good old paper stuff. Generally when you start a project you only draft your schematic on a piece of paper and it will be awful but it will help be a fast way of getting of putting your ID into something a bit concrete and there's also small software that I really like it's the GESCHIM it's really aimed more at analog design and most importantly to me it includes an electron tubes library that is a small multi-platform software it's written in Java so it can run on Windows, macOS, Linux, any BSD you want and it's of course open source software and it really is appropriate for drafting quickly a schematic without asking yourself too much questions about the design rules or the names or anything like that. Once you have your theoretical ID validated or at least you think this can work you have to make a proof of concept. Basically I like to talk about having a functional proof of concept that is taking a small piece from your final circuit to check if it will actually work. It might be for example reading an analog voltage in a specific way and this you can do with all the Chef modules most of the time. You have modules for my dafruits, spark funds, its studio and so on. You can use a breadboard or a prototype shield just thing that are for an ephemeral circuit design. Once you have your proof of concept validated and you sure at that point that every block from your circuit is going to work as you expected to you have to select your components. My advice on that is that you rather use widely available components not something from enough secure vendor located in you can find only on one or two websites and you don't really know about the future of the availability of these components. They must have available comprehensive and correct data sheets that is paramount. You have to really be able to know how the component will work depending on what are your inputs and the circuit around it. So the data sheets are really something that is fundamental when you select your components. Of course it has sufficient performances and a small one that is rather really personal but I really prefer through all mounting components. Don't forget that I mostly work with electron tubes which are big devices and all the components surrounding the tubes are high voltage capacitors and power resistors. So I'm used to working only with rather big components. Of course if you're using a microcontroller in a TQFP package you won't be able to do that but for someone who has not real experience in soldering starting with through all components is really easier way easier.  It's kind of a general proof of concept. You put all the bits and pieces together and then you check whether you can make your whole circuit work. It's used to validate the global hardware design and how every piece will interact with each other. You have to make generally lots of trial and error. So pick a modification friendly platform. I mostly use V-Robots as they allow me to switch the connections and easily solder and unsolder many components but again I'm working with whole mounted components and it's really not a prototype yet. Here you're having an example of one of my prototypes. It was a tube curve tracer actually with you you can see the Arduino for the digital part and all the analog circuits on the writer. Of course it's something quite ugly. It's fragile and maybe dangerous because I'm using here voltage around the 250 volts but this you get the idea it's something you don't intend to show off but it helps you really advance in your hardware design and fix most of your problems you will have in the future. In that case it was using the right operational amplifiers because I really had to use JFET input amplifiers and most of the time due to offset problems I didn't get the right results so it really helped me select the right component for my final project. Once you get to the point where your hardware design is validated you can finally design the PCB itself so for the most for a long time you only have to you were only able to use proprietary software for real-world projects you had already open source software but in my opinion most of the time you couldn't use it for to build a project from the ground up and get to the manufacturing. I'm talking mid 2000s right now right now we had in my opinion two big free and open source software suits which are K-CAD of course or K-CAD sorry I'm pronouncing it out of French and freezing. I'll start off with freezing it's really a nice piece of software the most recent one actually started the first version was released in 2008 so a bit less than a bit more than 10 years. It has a maker approach it's really maker oriented in my opinion you have some graphical views and a really eye candy interface for someone who's not used to the EDA software in general and it gives him some lots of advantages first off being having the fully integrated stack in in fact you have the schematics design the PCB routing and even an Arduino IDE inside the same software so you can do all your building and coding if you use an Arduino or Raspberry Pi microcontroller or store inside the same software so that's to me a big advantage for people who want to create a first project or at least are not really used with the whole development process of a connected or intelligent device it has a really user-friendly interface as you can see here this is really easy to visualize what you're doing and how you're doing it there are multiple design modes too here you can see the breadboard mode and the schematic capture mode and you can switch from one to the other and every connection you make on the breadboard mode will be transferred to the schematic mode and so on and most of the modules available on the market and the microcontrollers such as the Arduino Raspberry Pi even the Galileo and a few other ones are available in the default library of the software so when you're using off-the-shelf modules and the development board like these ones this is really a big time saver but of course has a few drawbacks at least in my opinion it's the library is quite limited only to popular and most available components and modules for instance it doesn't have any electron tube related components in the default library so that's really something that I for myself cannot choose new model creation is quite difficult because it has the things are really all nice looking and really nicely integrated you have to put more effort into creating a new component for fritzing with having a nicely drawn component component footprint and images and then you will do with the traditional EDS software so it's not something that you can't overcome of course but it requires a bit more time and a bit more involvement the auto rotor for the PCB stuff is quite poor I have to say I've only tried it really quick so maybe I'm wrong and maybe some of you will disagree but from my experience the auto rotor is really well quite almost unusable and not on par with what you could expect of a professional with the package and finally it's quite difficult to use for complex or exotic projects by exotic I mean some projects using electron tubes mostly but I'm sure some other people would have different different use cases and maybe going through with an FPGA on the TQFP144 package will prove to be a bit more difficult but using fritzing but then again if you getting to using these kind of packages maybe you're not the target audience of fritzing so you might rather use Kaikad this is the elder it started in 1992 so really old piece of software even by today's standards and it's the most widely used right now in the industry regarding open source CDAs I seen Olimax is an obvious big user of Kaikad and Purism which is designing currently a smartphone running Linux has designed the dev kits the dev boards for the smartphone using Kaikad and denting to make it public and open source so I hope they will deliver up to it but that's also a big big industry user of Kaikad Kaikad is not as integrated at fritzing you have two big software which are quite independent you have ESchema and PCBnew the first one of course is for schematic sculpture and PCBnew is the PCB rotor it includes also a lot of useful tools such as a PCB calculator with a lot of functionalities for instance design allows you to calculate the heat elevation of a track depending of its width and the current and its length and the current drone and passing through this track and other really useful stuff that are a great help in the design stage and it has to me some big advantages over every other open source EDA package first it is very actively developed and I have to say the CERN which is the European Center for Nuclear Researcher is devoting a few people working full time on Kaikad and first starting using the software or at least I tried to use it before their contributions I believe it was version 3 and starting with version 4 and the CERN contributions we really had the software which make a great leap forward in terms of usability and features and they really did an amazing job on that and it keeps getting better so that's something that's wonderful the library by default is quite comprehensive and it even includes a valve electron tube symbols and footprints you have also lots of third-party libraries as it is quite small software you have lots of people who have used it over the years and you can find virtually any component if not in the default library you will be able mostly to you find it in a third-party library it has advanced routing abilities like the push and shove router the routing of differential pairs with having the same length for every tracker and it integrates a simulation engine based on spice and 3d preview of course everything is not perfect mostly the interface is not really user-friendly for a first-time user you have to understand the way kick ad works and how every software integrates with the other and regarding the use of the mouse wheel and keyboard shortcuts it's not really something intuitive at first sight the user interface so I know that's something that's been worked on right now but between the schematic editor and the PCB designer you have really some inconsistencies in terms of user interface and user interaction so that can be difficult at first when using and that's I guess being worked to also but the two software don't communicate enough you don't have for now when you change a connection in the schematic editor it's not automatically pulled back in the PCB design you have to go through the netlist exports and import from the PCB new in order to make it to have the change available in the PCB editor so my advice is that you better use freighting if you had no prior experience with EDA software and electronics design and then when you get comfortable enough with it and need more features and more advanced capabilities go on through kick ad then you have to manufacture your PCB you can do it at home but it needs specific equipment and you need also some space it requires using some toxic products so it might be dangerous and it's also quite difficult at least when you start for double-solid boards or when you get thin tracks and really little spacing between tracks it's quite difficult to have a clean result so my advice is rather to go through professional manufacturing you have lots of of it now it's really cheap for small PCBs you can have five by five by 10 centimeters PCBs would cost something like 20 euros for 10 pieces including the shipping cost the drawback is that you have to order generally five to 10 PCBs minimum and there are lots of manufacturers to choose from you have a website which is PCB shopper and she's really nice and compares the prices and delays of every manufacturer or I think there are every manufacturer given the size and a few technical requirements for your PCBs other useful software which are Horizon which has been presented just before actually I didn't know it before I looked at the schedule for this room you had for them so I really give it a try and it's more modern EDA it uses KiCad's router so I guess you can definitely do something with it you also have GEDA which is an old projector but seems to be lagging behind KiCad for quite some time and something that found a bit fun it's Visolate it's an old project no longer maintained but it allows you to generate G-Code for building a PCB from a milling machine so that's another take on the PCB manufacturing which you can do in your local fab lab and I think it was interesting to mention then I get real quick through the next slides because I'm really light sorry so for designing a case you have some mechanical CAD software available first one being LibreCAD it's some kind of digital drawing board 2G only like you may have heard of AutoCAD in the 90s it's really the free software equivalent right now quite useful actually for doing laser cut like this case for example it will be drawn nicely on LibreCAD but of course you can't do anything which will be truly printed with it then you have OpenSCAD this is mostly I think of it as the software developers mechanical CAD where you code your shape and have only a 3D preview but you can't interact with and finally there is FreeCAD which is a more traditional approach and has a parametric 3D modeling the user interface is more close to the industry standards and it has a classical workflow which is you design a sketch in 2D and then through extrusion or rotation get a shape from it and that's all from me I don't maybe we have time for one question but I guess we're running really late sorry about that the question was did I try the free free distributed commercial software so proprietary software but not paying for it such as Eagle I've tried it back in 2005 I guess but since then I'm a long time free software advocate so I well when I found I was looking for a new EDS software five or six years ago I obviously wanted only free software so actually my friends switched to CAD-CAD from Eagle they have small commercial company they can't pay for it but they still switch to CAD because they become better


When you are your authentic self all the energies come home to be with that version of you I think we are manufacturing energy often when we don't know who we are yet, and we think oh here I should be kinder, so I'm gonna try and be kinder someone said to me you come across a bit harsh I'm not gonna do that, so I'm gonna try to be a bit softer, and it feels bolted on That's not a good way to try and approach energy The best energy is when that's who you are You're not trying and it's organic to who you are now True some people may not appreciate that energy. That's organic to you, but at least it's natural to who you are So it's fine It may not be for everybody's taste. That's okay still be true to your energy