Electronic – If you have multiple small pcbs in a single chassis, what is the naming convention for components

One little nit: Only really sloppy developers use daily builds because one build a day means having to wait up to a day to find out if you broke the build.

The best solution is to build and test every single change individually before letting it hit the public branch and revert the change if it breaks the build in any way.

Doing any sort of automatic testing on a schematic or a board layout might be very hard or impossible, but everything you can automate should be automated via something like Hudson, things that come to mind are:

• ERC
• DRC
• BOM updating (check that the parts exist, are available and calculate total cost)
• Generate Gerbers and other manufacuring files.
• Generate PDFs of the schematic and PCB layers as well as 3d renderings of the PDB, BOM diff and other documentation.
• Drop a mail to the developer mailing list with the commit message and links to the output files, so developers can review the change easily.

The number of errors that can be caught automatically might not be terribly high, but having the CI system generate the output files means that it will happen correctly every time and that you don't forget some silly setting when doing it manually.

Protoboards are up to you how to use, if it works, it works.

The three common methods of using them is using jumper wire, solder bridges, or using leads. Or all three, depending on your needs.

Solder bridges take a lot of solder, especially long ones. They are good for two or three adjacent points.

Using the leads, or bare wire, is great for straight lines and buses, using less solder than solder bridges.

And jumper wire is best for when you can't/don't want to go around an existing solder joint.

It all really boils down to what you need. Of course, solder bridges can be very sloppy if you don't have practice at them. And using too many jumper wires or bare leads looks ugly and not well thought out. But this is your project, you can figure out how to mount them, and what's acceptable or not.

If you need much of either, what you really want to do is think about the placement of your components, move stuff around to minimize the need to use jumpers or long bridges.