July 24, 2019

Robert Feranec on How to Implement The PCB Design Process

58 minutes

In this episode we talk with Robert Feranec, a familiar name to many of our listeners. Apart from being a popular YouTuber, he’s also the founder and CEO of FEDEVEL Academy where he teaches PCB Design to people around the world. Robert shares what it takes to be a popular YouTuber, the work it takes to produce all the great content he creates and as a special bonus we’ll discuss Robert’s Keynote that he will deliver at AltiumLive PCB Summit this October in San Diego.

Show Highlights:

Robert considers himself lucky to have started working on complex boards almost immediately after university. This early start provided much experience and he soon began freelancing.

As a freelancer, he did whole-board design i.e. specifications, schematics, layout, as well as testing and firmware.

He found he often couldn’t remember everything when using Altium Designer® and started doing YouTube videos, at first for himself, but soon garnered a following and today he has 24 000 followers.

As he became more popular, he received many email questions daily, which was very time consuming and he decided to create a forum where he offered a course, and the rest is history. Robert teaches Altium Designer but also CAD-independent content.

What goes into creating a video tutorial? Lots of preparation, a half-hour video takes almost two days to create. One hour of video training takes a week to create.

AltiumLive Topic: How Other Companies Implement Their Hardware Design Process. Many people ask about how other companies implement hardware design, create and use libraries, collaboration (design flow) and working faster.

Why do so many people only use a small percentage of their tool’s capacity? Most don’t need all the features. Many are nice to have but not always a necessity. Also, people learn to use the tool in a specific way and adding new features could interfere with an established workflow.

Robert’s talk at AltiumLive will provide insight into libraries, creating new components, component lifecycle, creating new symbols as quickly as possible, ensuring correct footprints, and more.

What are the challenges around collaboration? Communication between different types of engineers and how to manage several engineers working on the same project.

What about versioning and backup? Most companies will do both in the same way.

Document releases are very complex, there are too many emails back and forth. Robert will talk about ensuring correct documentation and release procedures.

What attracts people to your training? The different levels of the courses, the variety, and junior designers love them to upskill and get better jobs.

Links and Resources:

AltiumLive Summit 2019

Ben Jordan Podcast

Lawrence Romine Podcast

Altium Academic Page

Robert’s YouTube

FEDEVAL Academy

Robert’s LinkedIn

...more

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By Altium LLC.

2121 ratings

July 24, 2019

Robert Feranec on How to Implement The PCB Design Process

58 minutes

Show Highlights:

Robert considers himself lucky to have started working on complex boards almost immediately after university. This early start provided much experience and he soon began freelancing.