OnTrack: The PCB Design Podcast

In this episode we talk with Robert Feranec, a familiar name to many of our listeners. Apart from being a popular YouTuber, he’s also the founder and CEO of FEDEVEL Academy where he teaches PCB Design to people around the world. Robert shares what it takes to be a popular YouTuber, the work it takes to produce all the great content he creates and as a special bonus we’ll discuss Robert’s Keynote that he will deliver at AltiumLive PCB Summit this October in San Diego. 

Show Highlights:

• Robert considers himself lucky to have started working on complex boards almost immediately after university. This early start provided much experience and he soon began freelancing.
• As a freelancer, he did whole-board design i.e. specifications, schematics, layout, as well as testing and firmware. 
• He found he often couldn’t remember everything when using Altium Designer® and started doing YouTube videos, at first for himself, but soon garnered a following and today he has 24 000 followers.
• As he became more popular, he received many email questions daily, which was very time consuming and he decided to create a forum where he offered a course, and the rest is history. Robert teaches Altium Designer but also CAD-independent content.
• What goes into creating a video tutorial? Lots of preparation, a half-hour video takes almost two days to create. One hour of video training takes a week to create.
• AltiumLive Topic: How Other Companies Implement Their Hardware Design Process. Many people ask about how other companies implement hardware design, create and use libraries, collaboration (design flow) and working faster.
• Why do so many people only use a small percentage of their tool’s capacity? Most don’t need all the features. Many are nice to have but not always a necessity. Also, people learn to use the tool in a specific way and adding new features could interfere with an established workflow.
• Robert’s talk at AltiumLive will provide insight into libraries, creating new components, component lifecycle, creating new symbols as quickly as possible, ensuring correct footprints, and more. 
• What are the challenges around collaboration? Communication between different types of engineers and how to manage several engineers working on the same project.
• What about versioning and backup? Most companies will do both in the same way.
• Document releases are very complex, there are too many emails back and forth. Robert will talk about ensuring correct documentation and release procedures.
• What attracts people to your training? The different levels of the courses, the variety, and junior designers love them to upskill and get better jobs.

Links and Resources:

AltiumLive Summit 2019

Ben Jordan Podcast

Lawrence Romine Podcast

Altium Academic Page

Robert’s YouTube

FEDEVAL Academy 

Robert’s LinkedIn