As someone who's not an EE (with no degree in anything at all) and has made many circuit boards... No, they're not that complicated. Not really.
I've even designed an analog hall effect keyboard PCB with integrated IR sensor, dual power regulators (to handle 95 ultra bright RGB LEDs), invented-by-me analog hall effect rotary encoders (incremental and absolute), and more. It wasn't rocket science.
> I've even designed an analog hall effect keyboard PCB with integrated IR sensor, dual power regulators (to handle 95 ultra bright RGB LEDs), invented-by-me analog hall effect rotary encoders (incremental and absolute), and more. It wasn't rocket science.
Sorry to burst your bubble...
Glad you learned enough to do it and had fun with it.
Yet, such PCB's are trivial to design. Heck, one could auto-route something like that and get a working board for prototyping. In fact, I have done exactly that many times over the last four decades for keyboard/control-panel boards. And auto-routers suck. The fact that one can actually use one for a PCB is a good indicator of how trivial that design might be.
One of the big differences between hobby PCB's and professional EE-driven PCB's is in manufacturing and reliability.
It's one thing to make one or a few of something, anything. Quite another to make hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, millions. As an example, I am pretty sure you did not run your design through safety, environmental, vibration, susceptibility and emissions testing.
For an example of complex design one can look at such things as almost any dynamic RAM implementation, from SDR to DDRn. Timing, signal integrity and power integrity are a big deal and can make a massive difference in performance and reliability.
Another example is just-about any PCB used in automotive designs. They have to survive brutal power, thermal, vibration and RF environments for decades. This is not trivial.
Other fields with critical needs are medical, aerospace (which includes civilian flight) and industrial.
Consumer electronics is actually quite critical at the limit because you are dealing with very large numbers of units being manufactured. In other words, while a design for something like an industrial CNC machine might only require a few hundred or a few thousands of boards per year, in consumer electronics one can easily be in a situation where we are running 50K to 200K boards per month. Bad designs can literally sink a company.
I understand though. From the frame of reference of a hobbyist or enthusiast everything can look simple. That's pretty much because they just don't have enough knowledge or information. This means they only have access to the most superficial of constraints, which makes PCB's seem easy, maybe even trivial.
As my wife likes to say: A google search is not a substitute for my medical degree.
No, analog keyboard PCBs are not trivial at all. You have to keep a lot of things in mind when routing your analog VS digital tracks. Especially if you've got per-key RGB LEDs right next to your hall effect sensors (can be a lot of noise if you don't do it right).
Not only that but you also have to figure out how to get loads of analog sensors into a microcontroller that may only have 4 analog pins (e.g. RP2040). In a way that can be scanned fast enough for 1ms response times (again, without generating a ton of noise).
It's not so simple like an electromechanical keyboard PCB which is quite trivial.
> For an example of complex design one can look at such things as almost any dynamic RAM implementation, from SDR to DDRn. Timing, signal integrity and power integrity are a big deal and can make a massive difference in performance and reliability.
...except 99% of all PCBs aren't that complicated. You don't need to know the specifics of RF in order to design a board that controls some LEDs.
> No, analog keyboard PCBs are not trivial at all. You have to keep a lot of things in mind when routing your analog VS digital tracks. Especially if you've got per-key RGB LEDs right next to your hall effect sensors (can be a lot of noise if you don't do it right).
Sorry. This isn't meant as an insult at all. Yes, this stuff is trivial. I know it might not seem that way to you because you are not an EE. I get it. That does not make it complex. For you, maybe. Not for me or any capable EE.
Yes, having designed plenty of challenging analog products I can definitely say that analog has its own set of challenges. Designing keyboards with hall effect switches isn't in that category.
In fact, I could easily make the argument that high speed digital is actually analog design.
> You don't need to know the specifics of RF in order to design a board that controls some LEDs.
I would like to see your boards pass FCC, CE, TUV and UL certification.
Look, there's nothing wrong with being a hobbyist and having a great time designing stuff. Bravo for having learned enough to have done what you shared. That is definitely something to admire. Just understand that your experience does not give you the ability to fully grasp professional EE reality.
I don't really see why you would create a keyboard in this way.
> ...except 99% of all PCBs aren't that complicated. You don't need to know the specifics of RF in order to design a board that controls some LEDs.
There is a difference between creating something that works, which is easy enough to do, and creating something that is competitive on the consumer market, i.e. that BARELY works. This is the difference and why you would pay an EE to do this job.
Honestly all of that sounds like it maps pretty well to programming.
I sometimes run little 30 minute programming workshops where I teach people enough of the basics that they can walk away with something they’ve made. Give a novice 3 months to go through an bootcamp and they can become a half useful programmer.
But the “other half” of their knowledge will take a lifetime to learn. In just the last 2 weeks my job has involved: crypto algorithms, security threat modelling, distributed systems design, network protocols, binary serialisation, Async vs sync design choices, algorithmic optimization and CRDTs.
It’s easy enough to be a “good enough” programmer with a few months of study. But it takes a lifetime of work if you want to be an all terrain developer.
> Honestly all of that sounds like it maps pretty well to programming.
Yes, definitely. And, BTW, this also means that lots of useful work can be done without necessarily having golden credentials.
Here's where I see a huge difference between hardware and software at scale (I have been doing so for 40 years): Hardware, again, at scale, represents a serious financial and technical commitment at the point of release. Software gives you the ability to release a minimum-viable-product that mostly works and issues fixes or updates as often as needed.
If we imagine a world where v1.0 of a piece of software must work 100% correct and have a useful service life of, say, ten or twenty years, we come close to the kind of commitment real electronics design requires. You have to get it right or the company is out of business. Not so with most software products, be it embedded, desktop, industrial or web.
If I go back to the late 80's, I remember releasing a small electronic product that gave us tons of problems. The design went through extensive testing --or so I thought-- and yet, contact with actual users managed to reveal problems. I had to accelerate the next-generation design, put it through more extensive testing and release it. We had to replace hundreds of the first generation units for free because we felt it did not represent what we wanted to deliver. This is where knowledge and experience can be invaluable.
I've even designed an analog hall effect keyboard PCB with integrated IR sensor, dual power regulators (to handle 95 ultra bright RGB LEDs), invented-by-me analog hall effect rotary encoders (incremental and absolute), and more. It wasn't rocket science.