When I’m not brewing beer, I’m manufacturing circuit boards for a living. A lot of what I do every day revolves around how to handle projects that have design flaws. Most everything we build is very well designed, but because we introduce so many new designs to our process every single day, I spent a lot of time working with our team to figure out how to work around these design flaws.

Good thing is, I really enjoy it actually. It’s a fun challenge and I really enjoy working with our customers to come up with solutions to make their designs easier to assemble. With that in mind, I thought it would be a good opportunity to share some of the most common problems we run into while assembling circuit boards and share that with the attendees of KiCon in Chicago on April 26th and 27th.

The title of my talk is “Your Manufacturer Is Stupid – Help Them”. I know, it’s a real obnoxious title but figured it would drive traffic. The main point of the presentation will be to show the audience how many decisions are made during the manufacturing process and how KiCAD users can help their manufacturers answer questions before they’re ever even raised. I’m really looking forward to it and hope the turnout is strong so that we can have a 2nd even next year, and hopefully many more after that.