Christopher Tidy wrote:

Winston wrote:

The first time you see their cartesian component location technique you
should be happily freaked out. I sure was.


How did that work? Just measure along two axes?

You would read the reference designator of a component from the schematic
(Say C329) and look it up in a table. The table would reveal the cartesian
location of the component on the circuit board (Say F-5).

A cartesian grid was superimposed on a photograph of the circuit board
in question.

Letters IIRC were placed along the X axis and numbers IIRC along the Y axis.

When you looked at the intersection of 'F' and '5' on the circuit board
photograph, you could find component C329 in about a seconds time because
your search area was so much smaller than that of the entire board.

I used the same documentation technique for fasteners when I worked at a
well known Cupertino California Computer manufacturer. I saw that an
engineer using my documentation was able to quickly reassemble a notebook
in the proper sequence with the proper fastener in the proper location.

If you look at the Gerber file collection for a modern circuit board you
will see a file that relates each component's reference designator to an
XY offset from some corner fiducial. It's normally expressed in mils
but still reduces location time greatly. What am I saying? It makes it
*possible* to locate C329 in two minutes on a board that contains
several thousand components.

This, to me is the essence of cool.

--Winston