Reversed engineering is doable on 1 and 2 layers , but for 4 or more?Not impossible , you need a way too good reason to spend that kind of time or money(if you hire a company to do it for you). Tom's last amp is , I think, using 4 layers pcb, and not showing the schematic and using 4 layers pcb is a smart move .
That's a great way to handle it. Would some sort of quantity discount make sense, too? I'd expect that when someone orders 4 boards, he won't need 4x as much support or IP...
I think you can get Mouser to export an Excel spreadsheet from a project BOM. You get to define the columns, so you can have manufacturer and manufacturer P/N as two of the columns. I might be mistaken, but I'm pretty sure that's a supported feature. Then you just dump the spreadsheet into Digikey.
There's been a big run on ceramic capacitors lately for some reason. I'm not sure what's up with that.
Tom
That's a great way to handle it. Would some sort of quantity discount make sense, too? I'd expect that when someone orders 4 boards, he won't need 4x as much support or IP...
I provide 5% on orders of 10+ identical boards. 15% on orders of 20+ identical boards.
Compared to the performance you're getting, my prices are at rock bottom already.
Tom
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That is certainly an option. DIY = Do It Yourself after all...
I also provide a couple of references at the bottom of the Modulus-86 page that are worth digging into if you'd like to design a composite amplifier from scratch.
Tom
Hi Tom,
My comments are really to show you that you aren't saving any worthwhile IP by refusing to disclose schematics. I am planning to sell some amplifiers soon and with each one will have a schematic. If something happens to you, all your customers now own orphans and I strongly disagree with that.
About a month and a half ago now, someone I knew died. He was in excellent health, a real lay-back guy. He had a stroke on a Sunday and died the following Wednesday leaving his business to his family to sort out. Luckily he had sort of prepared for something like this and his family was able to act properly in an organised fashion. The point is, no one expected his death and he looked like he would live into his 90's easily. He was in his 50's when he died.
You could go at any time from any number of ways. I don't think it's right that any of your customers should be put out with a mystery box no one can easily fix. It costs your customer whatever time a tech needs to familiarize themselves with the product, and making future orphans is kinda punitive to the people who supported you.
I don't care to recreate something you designed. It isn't worth it even if I had a working drawing. Much cheaper to just buy them from you, so you're only defending yourself from an idiot. Everyone else may suffer from this one fear. Like I said before, the real magic is in how the board is routed. The schematic is only a crude starting point. I think your customers deserve to have the schematic (a correct one).
I've spent 40 years as a technician trying to repair people's equipment, made harder by manufacturers who just had to hide what was in the box. Even to the point where they marked all the parts with their own archan numbering series. It caused needless hardship for their customers and technicians. Anything good was ripped off anyway, and it was not via a schematic. It was by simply buying a working unit and stripping it down. This is when your real IP gets ripped off. Not by someone of very limited means who tries to build their own amps from your schematic.
As you yourself stated, your amplifier was ripped off by someone who bought a kit and copied it. It's pretty straight forward to delaminate a multilayer PCB to copy it also. The only way to prevent a copy made from your work is to never sell one.
Just saying, Chris
My comments are really to show you that you aren't saving any worthwhile IP by refusing to disclose schematics. I am planning to sell some amplifiers soon and with each one will have a schematic. If something happens to you, all your customers now own orphans and I strongly disagree with that.
About a month and a half ago now, someone I knew died. He was in excellent health, a real lay-back guy. He had a stroke on a Sunday and died the following Wednesday leaving his business to his family to sort out. Luckily he had sort of prepared for something like this and his family was able to act properly in an organised fashion. The point is, no one expected his death and he looked like he would live into his 90's easily. He was in his 50's when he died.
You could go at any time from any number of ways. I don't think it's right that any of your customers should be put out with a mystery box no one can easily fix. It costs your customer whatever time a tech needs to familiarize themselves with the product, and making future orphans is kinda punitive to the people who supported you.
I don't care to recreate something you designed. It isn't worth it even if I had a working drawing. Much cheaper to just buy them from you, so you're only defending yourself from an idiot. Everyone else may suffer from this one fear. Like I said before, the real magic is in how the board is routed. The schematic is only a crude starting point. I think your customers deserve to have the schematic (a correct one).
I've spent 40 years as a technician trying to repair people's equipment, made harder by manufacturers who just had to hide what was in the box. Even to the point where they marked all the parts with their own archan numbering series. It caused needless hardship for their customers and technicians. Anything good was ripped off anyway, and it was not via a schematic. It was by simply buying a working unit and stripping it down. This is when your real IP gets ripped off. Not by someone of very limited means who tries to build their own amps from your schematic.
As you yourself stated, your amplifier was ripped off by someone who bought a kit and copied it. It's pretty straight forward to delaminate a multilayer PCB to copy it also. The only way to prevent a copy made from your work is to never sell one.
Just saying, Chris
For what it's worth I don't think you'd be risking much by providing schematics. As others have said, if a rip-off merchant wants to clone your product it's not hard to do even for multilayer boards, see the huge number of far Eastern clones of popular electronic goods available on popular ecommerce websites for examples.
As a hobbyist, sometimes I properly do it myself putting a circuit together from scratch, from datasheets and application notes, knocking something together in EasyEDA and getting a small batch of PCBs made up; other times I "part DIY" by buying someone else's PCB and assembling it. Generally when I do the latter it's because I want to learn. So I build a Tubelab SSE to learn about that kind of circuit; I built my Modulus-86 setup partly to learn about that kind of circuit (partly also because I wanted a good quality amplifier module to integrate into a bigger project, with nice volume control and enclosure fittings. A schematic for the Modulus-86 would have been nice: I'll probably draw one at some stage from the PCB tracks. Not because I intend to copy it, but in order to learn from the design. Sometimes it's just easier to learn from a product than from theory books. But ultimately Neurochrome products are Tom's work and it's up to him how he makes them available. And, with the exception of schematics, the provided documentation is very good.
As a hobbyist, sometimes I properly do it myself putting a circuit together from scratch, from datasheets and application notes, knocking something together in EasyEDA and getting a small batch of PCBs made up; other times I "part DIY" by buying someone else's PCB and assembling it. Generally when I do the latter it's because I want to learn. So I build a Tubelab SSE to learn about that kind of circuit; I built my Modulus-86 setup partly to learn about that kind of circuit (partly also because I wanted a good quality amplifier module to integrate into a bigger project, with nice volume control and enclosure fittings. A schematic for the Modulus-86 would have been nice: I'll probably draw one at some stage from the PCB tracks. Not because I intend to copy it, but in order to learn from the design. Sometimes it's just easier to learn from a product than from theory books. But ultimately Neurochrome products are Tom's work and it's up to him how he makes them available. And, with the exception of schematics, the provided documentation is very good.
My take on this is that, bar the simple things that can be debugged from the block diagram, due to the nature of the beast those who actually can debug nigglies on this could do it without the schematic and for most others the schematic wouldn't actually help.
For the 'Tom under a bus' scenario there is always putting the design files with a lawyer with a nominated party to pick up if the worst happens. But right now not sure the volumes out there justify it and reliability seems pretty good based on posts here.
Needing a nominated service centre would be a happy problem for Tom in terms of the sheer numbers that would need to be out there for a low failure rate to justify it.!
For the 'Tom under a bus' scenario there is always putting the design files with a lawyer with a nominated party to pick up if the worst happens. But right now not sure the volumes out there justify it and reliability seems pretty good based on posts here.
Needing a nominated service centre would be a happy problem for Tom in terms of the sheer numbers that would need to be out there for a low failure rate to justify it.!
Do you get schematics when you purchase a Hypex module? Or a Pascal module? How about when you buy an ICEpower module? I highly doubt it.
That's not what the IP lawyers I've talked to through the years have been telling me.
The first questions an IP lawyer asks is always: "Is there anything patentable?" The answer is "no". A composite amplifier is not new, thus not patentable. Their follow-up question: "Is the design in the public domain?" If I keep sharing the schematic without a non-disclosure agreement, the design basically ends up in the public domain as far as I understand it. At the very least, it becomes much harder to protect it.
Now a lawyer will always think about how a case will present in court or arbitration; not what's practical or handy for folks who repair amps. Still. I think they're worth listening to in this case.
I completely agree. Yet, quite a few have done exactly that.
That's true as well.
I think I deserve to make a decent living. I'd be making 3-4 times as much working for somebody else and probably work half as much too.
True. Another option is to integrate a micro controller and keep the code tight to the chest. Set the various copy protection bits. Even that can be copied, but it does make it harder. And from a tech's perspective, you'd now be dealing with a black box within a black box.
Regarding the "estate planning": Duly noted. I do need to do a better job there. On many fronts, actually. Sometimes sh...t happens.
Tom
That's not what the IP lawyers I've talked to through the years have been telling me.
The first questions an IP lawyer asks is always: "Is there anything patentable?" The answer is "no". A composite amplifier is not new, thus not patentable. Their follow-up question: "Is the design in the public domain?" If I keep sharing the schematic without a non-disclosure agreement, the design basically ends up in the public domain as far as I understand it. At the very least, it becomes much harder to protect it.
Now a lawyer will always think about how a case will present in court or arbitration; not what's practical or handy for folks who repair amps. Still. I think they're worth listening to in this case.
I completely agree. Yet, quite a few have done exactly that.
That's true as well.
I think I deserve to make a decent living. I'd be making 3-4 times as much working for somebody else and probably work half as much too.
True. Another option is to integrate a micro controller and keep the code tight to the chest. Set the various copy protection bits. Even that can be copied, but it does make it harder. And from a tech's perspective, you'd now be dealing with a black box within a black box.
Regarding the "estate planning": Duly noted. I do need to do a better job there. On many fronts, actually. Sometimes sh...t happens.
Tom
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There are a few issues related with IP, normally categorized into Copyright, Patent, Trade Secret. Not providing any schematic would be effort to protect trade secret, yes, you do get some protection because of the demonstrated effort to keep it secret. However, once the information is in the open, it would be hard to press charges unless there is sufficient evidence that a copy was obtained through illegal means. For really large markets, this actually involves politics which generally end up in trade wars.
With copyright, even if the design is the same, it would really be hard to prove it was a copy unless you had a mistake intentionally put there compensated by other means, a tricky way to protect, otherwise one would have a hard time proving copy.
With copyright, even if the design is the same, it would really be hard to prove it was a copy unless you had a mistake intentionally put there compensated by other means, a tricky way to protect, otherwise one would have a hard time proving copy.
You're way ahead of me. And I agree that your prices are fine, both for the products' quality AND the support you offer. This Alibaba/Ebay/etc. race to the bottom is a suicide mission.
Hi Tom,
Guess what even a patent or NDA gets you?
The right to sue, that's all. It's not worth it buddy, I've been down that rough road. Even if you win the case, you now have that power to stop current production of fakes (and another related company springs up). You get a judgement for some cash, and to get that you end up having to sue for an "unsatisfied judgement". Your NDA could be, and should be in the original purchase and sale agreement (the bill of sale) if you want some kind of protection. I've been owed over $10K for more than a decade. Put a lien on his house and still do not have any settlement.
What it all boils down to is that the assumed "protection" really only allows you to pay a lawyer and become frustrated over time. The government is probably your best bet for protection and they don't cost anything.
My strong advice to you is to avoid attending court for any reason. You will not be happy if you do.
I don't know how much these kits are, and I don't disagree that you have the right to make a living off them. If you are gouging for money I would have a different view on this, but your customers seem to be happy. However, including a schematic with the kit with an NDA that self executes when they buy the kit, or build it would very probably satisfy your own desire for some protection. But using lawyers and the civil court system will not protect you in a timely matter, nor will you necessarily receive any monies owed to you via a judgement in your favor. These are questions you should be putting to your lawyer.
Remember one thing, the lawyers make their money providing this as a service to people like you. The court room is really a stage to impress the judge. The best performance usually wins. To me, that is taking an advantage of your good nature.
-Chris
Guess what even a patent or NDA gets you?
The right to sue, that's all. It's not worth it buddy, I've been down that rough road. Even if you win the case, you now have that power to stop current production of fakes (and another related company springs up). You get a judgement for some cash, and to get that you end up having to sue for an "unsatisfied judgement". Your NDA could be, and should be in the original purchase and sale agreement (the bill of sale) if you want some kind of protection. I've been owed over $10K for more than a decade. Put a lien on his house and still do not have any settlement.
What it all boils down to is that the assumed "protection" really only allows you to pay a lawyer and become frustrated over time. The government is probably your best bet for protection and they don't cost anything.
My strong advice to you is to avoid attending court for any reason. You will not be happy if you do.
I don't know how much these kits are, and I don't disagree that you have the right to make a living off them. If you are gouging for money I would have a different view on this, but your customers seem to be happy. However, including a schematic with the kit with an NDA that self executes when they buy the kit, or build it would very probably satisfy your own desire for some protection. But using lawyers and the civil court system will not protect you in a timely matter, nor will you necessarily receive any monies owed to you via a judgement in your favor. These are questions you should be putting to your lawyer.
Remember one thing, the lawyers make their money providing this as a service to people like you. The court room is really a stage to impress the judge. The best performance usually wins. To me, that is taking an advantage of your good nature.
-Chris