Electronic – Practical designs/practices for home electronics

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.

I Am Not A Lawyer, but...

the usual run of intellectual property divides into these areas:

• patents (government-granted monopoly of a method or system for accomplishing particular functions that are non-obvious, useful, and novel)
• copyrights (right to prevent others from using identical design elements)
• trademarks (government-registered brand names / logos)
• trade secrets (ideas kept secret, no legal protection here)

Unless you have a patent on a particular functional piece of circuitry, or you can prove that someone else made an effort to copy widespread portions of your schematic/layout/software, it would be difficult to keep someone else from using similar circuit elements. (And the same for them to prevent you from doing so.)

Resistor dividers + capacitors probably don't meet either criterion (although the US Patent Office has granted patents for things that are more obvious), so I wouldn't worry about it.

If you're talking about more complex ideas, you should probably talk to an attorney who specializes in intellectual property law.