DEBUG AND FIX – THE MORE THE BETTER

The inspiration to write this article is a recent conversation with a potential customer I have few days ago. Reflecting on it I am realizing that some of my answers probably sounds kind of offensive although my intention was different, to educate. I hope this customer do not take it neither personally neither offensive nor if so, I would like to ask to be apologized.

 This is not the first and not be the last of those conversations, and this what make me to write. I do not write for the professionals familiar with this business, but more for those who have neither sufficient experience nor sufficient knowledge in field of electronics, firmware and in general embedded applications.

The intention is not to educate, but more to orient them what to look for, both as a knowledge that they should grow before went in to such a conversations and knowledge and experience they should be looking for. Those are usually startups, or well-established companies that facing the modern times “yes you have the best concrete mixer on the market, but it still should be connected” everyone have those projects.    

Having all this said here is what I am talking about, a customer asked, “Do you have an experience with RTC and power switches”. I will use this last conversation just because is still fresh in my memory, not that is so wrong or different from the others.  So, what the answer on such a question should be, what the customer expects to hear, and why probably what they want to hear do not matter at all.

If you are an inexperienced designer but you deal with the RTC, or you have a lot of experience but for you this is “just another customer” you may simply answer Yes. But what that mean? For the customer probably it means this is a guy with the proper experience for me, but is that the truth?

The fact that you use once, twice, or even 50 times RTC do not made you an RTC expert, there is no such a thing. There are hundreds RTC chips on the market, there are even more implementations as a part of a microcontrollers, security chips etc.   Is the problem related to the RTC at all? Many experience designers will tell you probably it’s not. This is the first side of the problem, customers asking questions that in best case are not specific and the answers really didn’t matter.  

A proper question can be “Did you ever use DS5000, we have a problem with the embedded RTC …”  And in some case, such questions make sense, there are specific chips and applications where having an engineer that face them before may save you some time and money.  And yes, a customer having such a detailed question probably already knows everything I would like to say.

As said in the beginning, many of those customers do not have education, knowledge, and experience in that area, and they shouldn’t have, but they do parallels. Here the second problem begun, may be RTC is like knee replacement, you don’t go to a dentist for a knee surgery, right? For many of them “Do you have an experience with RTC” sounds a reasonable question. 

Unfortunately, the parallels with a familiar things not always works, and even if such an analogy is possible, they mismatch the criteria. Yes, there are an expert in analogue electronics, there are FPGA experts, RF experts etc.

Let’s try a different approach, why do we have neurosurgeons, or implant surgeons, a dentist ... the list is quite long, the simplest answer those are craftsman, and as any craftsman they are very good in what they are doing, but our knowledge for the human body beside pure physical aspects of it just scratch the surface of why and how this machine works.

With the engineering the situation is much simple, there are laws and theories and their mathematical and experimental prove and they explain well enough how things works. This may be not a universal truth, but is true for our planet, our solar system, probably for our galaxy.

Having the knowledge, you no need to be anymore a craftsman, the RTC oscillator is not different from the FPGA oscillator, the RTC use the same gates and triggers that are used in any microcontroller, the RTC communicate on the same i2c or SPI bus as your memory, ADC or IO expanders, in reality many RTC are highly specialized microcontrollers.

There are more sides of this problem, but if the customer overcome those two, he will be able to ask the right questions and to have a better idea what he is looking for.

At first place, do not ask nonspecific questions, but how you should know what is nonspecific?  Just assume any question that is related to the supposed source of the problem will become nonspecific, simply because you don’t know the specifics.  Abstract of what your team or the design engineer told you, if they have the answers, you will not be looking for someone to help you at first place.

               What should you ask? Better first explain, do not ask.  Try to provide as more information is possible about your problem, and here the information you have may fit well, even if not accurate at all.

               On second place keep on mind this is not a medical appointment, neither car repair, don’t try to diagnose the problem yourself. Do not narrow the specialist you are looking for, unless you are confident that you have very specific issue. There are such a situation, may be you struggle to obtain sampling of a nanoampere signal with femtoampere accuracy, in that case you better look for someone that did this before, but this is not a common case.

               More important question is what person you should looking for, and if you are not the guy who chasing femtoamperes then better look for someone with a broad experience.  As many different projects this person have, as better for you, you shouldn’t care about his experience with a RTC, and for sure he will have it.

               The number of the projects itself is not the only criteria, look the applications. Is this guy design only instrumental clusters, or only process controllers, etc. Nothing bad in that, maybe he is the best in this field, but maybe he misses many other fields, many other experiences that would help him when become to solving your specific problem, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

               You should understand that to debug and fix a problem usually not required the best specialist in a certain filed, instead require specialist that have broad knowledge and experience. Beside everything else this process requires strong analytic and associative thinking.

               Keep on mind to repair a device is a simple task, to design a device is much complicate task, but debugging and fixing the problem is even much harder. Fixing a problem is not a repair, something can be repaired and to get broken again because a design flaw, the purpose of the fix, is to find and eliminate the design flaw.

               Any active designer is more or less involved in the debug and fix of his own designs, so naturally with the time he grown experience and knowledge that he didn’t have at the beginning of his carrier. I am not smarter than 30 years ago, actually nowadays for me is much difficult to memorize new things, but because those 30 years my ability to debug and fix is order of magnitude better and faster.

               THE MORE THE BETTER, when become to debug and fixing this is an important rule, the more years of experience the better, the more projects the better, the wide fields of experience the better, you don’t look for the best specialist in a filed, you are looking for someone that can see and analyze the whole picture.