kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Karl Schmidt <karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 04/19/2013 08:17 AM, jp charras wrote:
> Le 19/04/2013 14:48, Lorenzo Marcantonio a écrit :
> > On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 02:41:01PM +0200, jp charras wrote:
> > > Engineering Comment Order
> >
> > Maybe Engineering Change Order? some CAD use this term for forward/back
> > annotation...

It is ECO Engineering Change order - and there is possible confusion thus my comment:

PADS used the term to mean a sort of diff file (xxx.eco) of the schematic that got sent to the PCB 
and the opposite. ( A real bad idea to use reverse ECOs BTW .. but they had the feature)

In real life ECO means something a bit different -- they are documents that help stop things like 
purchasing substituting parts with lower voltages.. I would write and sign an ECO for any part 
change - sometime purchasing would not be able to get a particular part so before they could buy a 
substitute it would have to be approved by Engineering with a signed ECO.

If there was a design flaw and a product needed changing - again there would be a ECO document. 
Making changes with out a paper trail can cost huge sums of money.

I'm supposing that the ECO layers in kicad would be to put text strings describing the changes? I've 
always wondered what the original intent was?

See :
http://wiki.xtronics.com/index.php/EE_CAD_Terminology

and this (which is really narrow and seems to not realize that ECOs are used in many engineering 
fields outside of electronics ) :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_Change_Order



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Karl Schmidt                                  EMail Karl@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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There is nothing wrong with this,
except that it ain't so.
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