MetaMorph Helps non-Engineers Design Circuits (Video)

Video MetaMorph Helps non-Engineers Design Circuits (Video) 21

Posted by Roblimo on Friday July 10, 2015 @03:52PM from the another-step-on-the-road-toward-unskilled-labor-replacing-skilled-engineers dept.

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MetaMorph grew out of Vanderbilt University’s Institute for Software Integrated Systems. The introduction video you see here explains and steps you through its basic operation. The second "bonus" video goes a little deeper into the software's function. And the transcript covers everything in both videos, so if you prefer reading to watching you aren't left out -- except for the visual design process walk-through, of course. It's all open source, and their site has free demos available, so if you want to try your hand at designing circuitry with MetaMorph, go right ahead.

Tim Lord for Slashdot: Justin, could you explain MetaMorph a little bit?

Justin Knight: Hey, how's it going? MetaMorph is a software company out of Nashville, Tennessee. We develop software tools for electronics hardware design and our tools are open source and they allow you to design hardware even if you're not an expert hardware designer. So, we’re trying to really lower the bar to entry and abstract the process for folks.

Slashdot: Now to put that in practical terms, if somebody wants to program a Raspberry Pi and they know what they want to do in a final product, how do you go from a sketch in a napkin to actually making your end product do what you want?

Justin: Well, so one thing is we'd like to work in functional blocks rather than the component level. So, a person who is a novice may not understand which capacitors they need or which resistors they need, but they will more likely understand that they need a microphone or an FM radio or things like that and we design those for you, so that you would simply click and drag them onto our canvas and you'd be up and running with that once you make the connection. If you have something beyond that, we can take a schematic model and use that to integrate into our system.

Slashdot: So, on a practical level, can you walk us through a little bit of that?

Justin: Yes, absolutely. Okay, so here is our system here. So, we have a number of platforms that we support and I think a lot of folks are familiar with Arduino and this is our Arduino interface that you can design to. So we talked about a microphone, so let's pull from our library of sub-circuits. These are again functional blocks and take this microphone and put it on here and it’s running over my Wi-Fi Hotspot, so hopefully it gets going for us.

Slashdot: Justin, to go from an application that you have in mind to actually putting it onto a board, can you walk us through that process a little bit?

Justin: This is kind of our most basic interface, the Arduino Shield, and using this you'll be able to have something that's compatible with Arduino. So, we talked about a microphone. Here is our microphone block. If we click inside here, we can see that it is made up of resistors and capacitors and all kinds of components. Back to here, you are going to be kind of working at the block level. So, you're going to rig it up like this to the power and then we will connect the analog signal and connect it. And now we have a microphone and an Arduino. Once we do this, we can auto-route a printed circuit board. And this will run an Eagle CAD board generation and we'll get back a board file that is valid for manufacture.

Now Arduino is a really good platform. So people who don't know a lot about hardware can hope to develop something like this. This is a working blood pressure monitor. Now, the issue with this is, while it works it’s kind of an ugly prototype. What our tools will do is allow you to move to different platforms that are of a more advanced form factor. So, this particle photon board is something that they've been handed out at Solid Con today and now this is a more advanced WiFi platform, and we can take something like this that you would develop on your own, and get you set up to get something professionally made more like this.

So, we really take folks from this rough prototype to more of a product-level design. So, here's the board back from my microphone and Arduino, so it's super basics. So this is what an Arduino Shield’s board looks like, so it’s very big and there's the small microphone circuit put up there in the top right.

Slashdot: And that's a lot simpler than using something like Eagle CAD to start with?

Justin: That's right. So with Eagle CAD, you’re going to have to have knowledge of components and placement and all these sort of rules that a hardware designer spends a lot of time learning. In our case, we do the hand-routing ourselves and add that to our content library. So, if I look in here with my sub-circuits, we have hand made these and validated them so that we know that they're able to be manufactured and we know that they work. So, that is kind of our way around fully auto-routing a device and most hardware folks we’ve been talking to the past couple of days, they don't trust auto-routers, but if you can hand-route most of it, auto-routing the blocks is a lot simpler problem that is easier for the programmatic.

Slashdot: So, you’re hand making some of the subsystems, they logically should just fit together?

Justin: That's right. That’s right and yeah, and so you can fit many on a card this big and this will get you set up for Project Ara development which is our end goal for users.

Slashdot: Now, speaking of that, could you address two more things quickly, one is the motivation for this in the first place, how did MetaMorph come to be, the other thing is you mentioned open source before, how does that play into the MetaMorph story?

Justin: Yeah, absolutely. So, me and my group are from Vanderbilt University and we were doing work in the mechanical domain with a set of open source tools based on the same technology. We were, two years ago, approached by Google who was then actually Motorola, and to make a set of software tools to design hardware modules for their smartphone which is now called Project Ara. Project Ara is a modular phone where folks can swap out the blocks, you can get cameras or batteries or special sensors or all kinds of fun devices and configure your phone. What they're really hoping to do is create an ecosystem of all types of developers from big companies to small guys to contribute to what is effectively an app store for hardware.

Slashdot: And the open source aspect of it, talk a little bit about that?

Justin: That’s right. So, part of the goal in Google hiring us was to create an open source toolset. So just like many tools for designing apps are open source and that really gets the market going, they want an open source kit so that people can jump in right away and it's low-risk and that sort of stuff. Many of these tools are expensive, and hard to use and that sort of stuff, so it's something that really allows us to work with anyone. We don't have a proprietary issue and we're able to work in a kind of lightweightway because of that. And we really like open source. It makes things easier for us, it's a fun environment, so that's one of things we like.

Slashdot: It’s a bridge here between open source software and hardware, which _____05:59 both.

Justin: That’s right.

Slashdot: But they are different worlds in a sense.

Justin: Absolutely. So just like I said, we had our photon and our electric amp models from people that we've met here. We found these designs online, they share them on GitHub, and we were able to just plug them right in, so that was really great. As much as we like to contribute to open source, I think we take advantage of that just as much, so.

Slashdot: If somebody wants to build towards one of the boards in support?

Justin: Yeah.

Slashdot: Can they try this out now?

Justin: Yes, absolutely. Our website is metamorphsoftware.com, and our webtools are right on there. We also have desktop tools with more capabilities. We are moving our capabilities to the web. And we want to talk to people who want to develop their ideas. So, we're really working with anyone because right now Project Ara is not a platform you can develop to, so we're just trying to get some traction and get people excited about using our tools, and we're really willing to work with them hand-in-hand if we need to do to get going, so, yeah.

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