Case study
Lumafield has developed the world’s first accessible X-Ray CT scanner for engineers. Lumafield’s easy-to-use scanner and cloud-based software give engineers the ability to see their work clearly, inside and out, at an extremely affordable price.
#enhanced-collaboration
#design-reviews
#revision-tracking
#in-design-feedback
#centralization
#snippet-function
Testimonial
Our customers partner with us to enhance collaboration, improve time-to-market speeds and reduce development costs. Discover how Lumafield leverages the power of allspice.io for its hardware designs.
Life before allspice.io
Before AllSpice, Matt Zabatta and Katy Kem, Electrical Engineers, designed in Altium and saved their revisions in GitHub. Schematics were then sent to management for review, but there needed to be a formal process in this handoff.
As the electrical engineering team grew, Lumafield decided they needed more structure to reduce design errors.
“It was a lot easier to track revisions with one person using GitHub. When Matt joined, we were two people who wanted to modify boards and run design reviews with each other. That was the moment when we knew we needed a solution that could support multiple engineers.”
AllSpice puts everything in one place. It’s our place to go for all the information we need.
The electronic-focused features are why our team uses AllSpice. The platform allows us to do anything we’d like to in GitHub for software, but for our hardware.
Process improvement
In previous roles, both Matt and Katy had even utilized PowerPoint slides of screenshots during in-person design reviews. Feedback was also communicated on PDFs using markdown.
“We needed a way to be more confident in keeping track of all of the tasks and issues to resolve. Having slides and spreadsheets with various owners wasted a lot of time and money.”
“AllSpice puts everything in one place instead of across Slack, slides, and pdfs. It’s our place to go for all the information we need.”
For third-party consultants, communication was also a challenge. Feedback was provided through email chains with Altium files attached, increasing the likelihood of version control issues and lost feedback.
“The burden to keep track of revisions was all on the designer.”
By enabling people to participate in design reviews on their own time, the responsibility of revision tracking was now automated and delegated with traceability through AllSpice. “It’s nice that you can asynchronously do reviews in such an organized fashion.”
The team became accustomed to AllSpice quickly. “The how-to guides and tutorials are very helpful. Even since we started using AllSpice, the resources in the knowledge base have continued to grow.”
Current State
The commenting and snippet features allow for in-design feedback.
“The first feature of AllSpice that really appealed to me was the embedded viewer of the schematics with the snippet function.”
Lumafield’s team has also gained the ability to share design reviews seamlessly with other departments and third parties.
“AllSpice is much better at allowing us to give the design to people who don’t have Altium or other ECAD software.”
AllSpice’s robust feature set helps the team centralize its tech stack instead of piecing together disparate tools. “The electronic-focused features are why our team uses AllSpice. The platform allows us to do anything we’d like to in GitHub for software, but for our hardware.”