Do the board designs you output look alien / weird to people who have been laying out boards by hand / with conventional EDA tools? If so, is it causing any resistance to JITX adoption?
A common creature comfort requirement for anything that transpiles / codegens, is source maps so that while debugging you can see the lines of code that you(r team) typed, rather than harder-to-read generated code. Have you thought of trying to bring that concept to JITX?
Super interesting, thanks for posting this.
JITX only produces weird-looking designs when they are provably correct and of high-performance. You can't throw an indecipherable mess to an EE and ask them to spend time understanding it. That's just not a productive way to design. There's a lot of work we do to make a design legible, including generating a schematic for the user to read.
Yes! Our 'source-maps' connect the generated design checks, board, and schematic back to the originating line of code. So the user sees the output they are familiar with (e.g. schematic), and can trace it back to the line of code it came from. Collaboration in a team happens more at the source-code level, and we make sure that the same CAD design gets generated when that code is run.
- Fully automated place and routing up to 3d PCB level, with constraints including locked item positions, orientations and board stackup. Most likely ML based and fairly quick and trained on a simulator that takes into account various design rules, realistic physics, etc . Zero input from a GUI.
- Datasheet semantics implemented directly into code / logic and rules checking and analog simulation
- Use typescript, jsx to create the simplest way to implement components and sub circuits. (I know this isn't going to happen)
- Use a cloud package manager so people can share thier sub circuits and ICs
- Interactive heirarcical schematic
> Use typescript, jsx to create the simplest way to implement components and sub circuits. (I know this isn't going to happen)
I can see why not many people would be willing the learn a new language from JITX (stanza?), but why typescript/jsx instead of python?
> Use a cloud package manager so people can share thier sub circuits and ICs
Why not just a github repository? Kind of like https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs
Im not familiar with pulling a github repo to get at a package, if it allows anybody to make their circuits publicly available, forkable, etc then all good..
Can someone smarter than me tell me if jitx solves that problem?
It's a major use cases these days with all the churn coming from supply chain volatility.
Are you planning to make some kind of "hobby" tier below the startup pricing at a later date?
From a language perspective it's quite different. VHDL has super-limited semantics to make it easier to synthesize. JITX is embedded in a general purpose programming language, which makes it more productive to write, and capable of describing all the weird little details that need to be handled for board design.
The GitHub analogy is particularly captivating.
The potential for applying code re-use and other programming principles in hardware could create a 'Cambrian explosion' of activity there.
I'll be monitoring this with some excitement!
I hope they succeed. They easier it is to make new hardware, the more competition is, the better products we get as consumers.
Launch HN: JITX (YC S18) – Automating Circuit Board Design - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17654865 - July 2018 (54 comments)
Godspeed JITX
Not sure why but I seem to be unable to share your website on facebook messenger. Maybe it mistakenly ended up on a blacklist?
