37% Of Design Is Choosing Components?
Pulse
Octopart Staff
Oct 10, 2017

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This is a guest post from Chris Gammell, host of The Amp Hour electronics podcast and founder of Contextual Electronics, a program that teaches people how to design and build electronics from scratch on the web.

I teach a course about electronics online. It's meant to be about the whole design process, from start to end; how do you get from an idea to a finished PCB? The process was always mind-boggling to me when I was getting started and now I'm trying to help others figure it out faster than I could on my own.

The crazy thing is how much of that time is picking parts. Here's a brief outline of the course.

  • Introduction and background info (including how to use KiCad, the open source CAD program) -- 1 week
  • Talking about what we want to design and how we'll approach it -- 1 week
  • Picking parts, feeding that back to the schematic and getting the footprints figured out -- 3 weeks
  • Doing the layout, with occasional checking of datasheets and other available components (assuming ones we chose previously did not work) 3 weeks.
So that means we're spending more than 37% of the time in the course searching for parts and trying to figure out what will work best in the project we're designing. When I think back to my days as a design engineer (I recently resigned from my job to work on Contextual Electronics full time), it was much of the same story; having a baseline knowledge of which parts are in the market is an asset for any engineer. Knowing not just what kind of component is needed, but also a general range of what is available for purchase and recent technology changes (or lack of) is a good thing to know. Back in the day, engineers had to have this all written down somewhere or on their shelves in the form of databooks. These days, it comes down to the best search methods available.

This is a place where Octopart really excels in my opinion. Nothing is worse than looking for a new part type within a category and something being excluded simply because it's out of stock at the distributor site you happen to be searching. With Octopart, I can narrow down the field of components I'm looking for by using the parametric search and then I can see if that part exists across the entire supply chain. This can even influence some of my design decisions and I teach similar thought processes as part of Contextual Electronics: Would you want to design in a component that is out of stock across the entire visible supply chain? What about if it was only held by one online distributor? Would you have high confidence that part will be available when it comes time to start building your product? These are some of the subtle decision points I try to teach as part of Contextual Electronics because I know I was never expressly taught them. No, I learned them the same way many engineers do...the hard way!

Moving forward, I'll be working in "Session 1B" with the members of Contextual Electronics to actually build the thing we designed in "Session 1A" (the current session). This will be another challenge because we'll actually be constructing boards remotely (with very few members being in the same country, let alone the same metropolitan area). And while teaching and getting feedback from remote members will be difficult, it's also going to be a challenge ensuring that members have access to the parts they need (and can get them in a reasonable amount of time). This is another area where Octopart really excels; members won't need to order directly from the same stateside online distributor that I use and can instead optimize for shipping times and part availability. We also tried to choose components that had the option to be swapped out, due to specifications or stock availability.

I'm really excited about the continuing prospect of teaching electronics to people online. It's great to have a group of self-selected enthusiasts who really want to be learning the material being taught. Octopart has been a wonderful resource to us and will continue to be for finding the parts we need for our builds and for designing in new parts.

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