[fool1471]

> A part of me sort of hates to see these companies do their thing, because it’s making the fun part of the job shorter and faster.

For sure! PCB layout is one of the best and most enjoyable parts of the job.

My major concern with these products is always the quality of the schematics they produce. It's not enough for a schematic to have all the nets connected correctly - a schematic is a piece of documentation that, when drawn well, should convey a lot more information than simply what pin is connected to which others.

[gabesullice]

I'm not an EE, so please understand this as a sincere question: wouldn't the code and its comments become documentation that would otherwise be in the well-drawn schematic?

As an outsider, my assumption is that the schematic would become less of a design document and more of a simple visualization.

What am I missing?

[Workaccount2]

There are some electronics products where schematics hardly convey anything. Heavily digital stuff is often just a whole bunch of squares with dense rows of lines connecting them. Maybe a few caps and resistors here and there.

For analog stuff though, a schematic is absolutely fundamental to understanding how the circuit works and how to troubleshoot/fix it. Handing an engineer a code description of an analog circuit will basically have them just trying to mentally build the schematic in their head while reading it.

Imagine a model sharing 3D printing website that got rid of all the 3D model representations and just put the model code in their place. It would be borderline useless (despite your 3D printer having no issue still printing the stuff). Similar situation.

[LM358]

>wouldn't the code and its comments become documentation that would otherwise be in the well-drawn schematic?

Technically, yes, but 99% of EEs would not approve of code in some weird new DSL as documentation for a circuit. While it may contain the same information as a drawn schematic, it is much more inscrutable and introduces mental overhead when you actually need to read it.

There's also a huge difference between a poorly laid out schematic and an excellent one; the latter makes it easier to follow the flow of signals and power through relevant parts of the circuit and allows you to easily pick out the different parts/modules and how they play their part in the circuit as a whole, all with a quick glance at a drawing.

I guess a (poor) software analogy would be that you could surely implement a function as a bunch of GOTOs and/or BRANCH commands, but just making a nested for loop would make the logic much clearer.

[fool1471]

Yes absolutely this.

The major issue is that there are a lot more stake-holders in a schematic design than just the person who draws it.

Often the person who draws the schematic is not the person who lays out the PCB, so the schematic needs to encode information about how to lay the PCB out. For example, you may have several components in parallel in a filter circuit; the order that they are placed on the schematic can be used to communicate which order they should be placed on the board (but does not affect the electrical correctness of the schematic at all), and this in turn helps to betray the function of these components.

Even if the whole PCB design is being done by one engineer, other engineers need to be able to review it. If a schematic is electrically correct but otherwise a mess, it makes reviewing it a lot more difficult.

Then there will be third-parties who need to read the schematic and understand the design - for hobbyist products this could be the end-users, and in consumer products it might be service engineers. A well drawn schematic makes a PCB easier to understand and therefore easier to debug, repair, and modify.

In the analogy of software vs schematics, schematics are both code and documentation at the same time.

[DHaldane]

Schematics ended up being a hard requirement, so we put in the work to generate good ones automatically and the tools for EEs to adjust the aesthetics without ruining the correctness of the design.

You are right that the schematic becomes visualization/documentation here - it's not necessary to generate, because the only information it technically provides is a netlist which we already have from code.

But it's needed documentation. In practice it's helpful to use as you debug your design code.