Flux AI PCB Design and the Errors Startups Make - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: November 03, 2021, 12:40:23 am
content: Flux AI, a browser based collaborative PCB design tool that raised $12M in funding.Dave & Chris reckon that it's a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist, and have missed the mark. But hey, $12M ain't chump change.https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/13/browser-based-hardware-design-tool-flux-raises-12m/https://www.flux.ai/

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 03, 2021, 03:40:31 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on November 03, 2021, 12:40:23 amOh boy. Just what the world needed. Will it update my Twitter every 30 seconds with my BGA breakouts and differential pair pad entries too?

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 14, 2021, 06:38:00 pm
content: It's just yet another example of jumping on the hype bandwagon and trying to shove AI and "cloud" tools down everyone's throat even when that solves zero problem.As you said, it still gets a lot of cash, so why would people not try? Just sad that all this cash isn't put to better use.

author: nctnico
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 14, 2021, 08:34:16 pm
content: I disagree with not being able to create schematics with a team. For large projects there is no way around it in order to get it finished. In the end a single engineer can't know/understand all the intricate details for a complex circuit. The same for board layouts. FFS, modern day CAD packages like Altium, Orcad, etc offer the ability to work on a project with a team of people. And lot of this likely trickled down from chip design where things can become wildly complex.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 15, 2021, 10:26:17 pm
content: In the end, Dave doesn't say that several people working on the same schematic can't be done or is never done - what he says is that typical workflows are nothing like what this startup thinks they are, and that their potential market, while maybe not void, is likely much smaller than what they claim.We can agree that actively collaborating on the same schematic is likely to happen on large projects, in large teams, in large organizations. Problem is, this is the exact kind of setting where it would be very hard to make them switch to such a tool. They usually have been using one of the major tools for a long time, swear by it, engineers are skilled with it, they have large in-house libraries carefully crafted over the years, etc. Making them change tools would be very hard. (By "actively collaborating" I mean several people actually needing to *edit* the same schematic at the same time - while collaborating in general, as Dave also said, is a common thing and mainly comes from design reviews, part selection, pre-schematic design - yeah you don't need to get right away drawing stuff on a schematic actually.)It's just that those startups all want to shove the software development model down everyone's throat and apply it to everything. It almost never works. Applying typical software dev methods to hardware has shown to consistently fail, while usually making engineers very angry.And the bonus points of this tool apparently using AI and doing some automagic stuff just adds to the smelly odor.

author: m98
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 02, 2021, 09:56:38 pm
content: I have often collaborated with 1-2 people on one design using collaboration tools that directly integrate with the EDA software. So I actually think that being able to simultaneously work on a schematic/pcb with a few other people Google docs style could be a really nice thing. There is just so much work that can be parallelized in a design.

author: Bassman59
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 06, 2021, 02:55:41 am
content: I kinda want to know how their cloud-based software manages the problems stemming from the chip shortage.