If Nikanor Ivanovich's lips and Ivan Kuzmich’s nose should be attached ...

Max’s last post about a sloppy engineer who ignores the magazine prompted me to think about my own notes.

The recording of information on the development process, the results of measurements made (and rejected) decisions, the performed calculations are part of any engineering work. In each project there are many aspects to be documented, and projects using controllers and / or programmable logic also contain the software part, up to the object code (so that you don’t try to remember painfully, and under what environment this project was compiled and why ). Reasons why we should keep records include (but are not limited to):

• Development confirmation,
• Receiving data for use in passports,
• Determining approaches for testing devices
• Patents
• Legal liability,
• Accounting and auditing (for tax credits or interim payments),
• ISO audit.

At the moment I use documentation in the style of the 20th century - all on paper. I have a binder folder in which I keep the requirements, specifications, lists, charts and other pieces of paper, as well as a journal for notes (laptop). In fact, my laptop is more like a journal for notes. It contains handwritten notes, drawings and calculations, along with pasted pages, such as Excel worksheets, photos, oscillograms, design descriptions, and others. It all looks rather clumsy and not very convenient at work when you try to follow the requirements of the ISO audit.

The application I would like to have should repeat the design of the binder folder as a single file with a definite improvement. I would like it to be ported to both PC and wearable devices. Of course, the ability to enter text on the keyboard and the ability to include MSWord and PDF files is mandatory. You could also add handwritten notes, preferably with a stylus, since it works better than my finger. Converting handwritten text into a machine-readable form will be a significant advantage when searching. The application should be able to add notes to the included sheets in PDF format. It should contain a simple tabular processor to collect data, for example, from the air conditioner, and then perform some simple calculations. But it should also be able to integrate more complex calculations using Excel or even Matlab, although I am ready to accept screen shots with hyperlinks to the appropriate files.
')
I would like to see a function to add bookmarks, so that I get cross-links throughout the file. Cross-references in the source code would be very useful, since some data cannot be included in the source code.

Interaction with devices via DVMS or something like USB or Wi-Fi is probably unrealistic in the short term, although it would be nice to have something like a scripting language or a programming language to customize to the user.

Obviously, there should be a centralized storage of electronic files, but synchronization should be as simple as possible.

There are dozens of applications that affect certain aspects of my wish list, but so far I have not found one that implements a truly integrated approach. At the same time, all the necessary technologies already exist, and I hope that this blog will encourage someone to create such an application. Sometimes it seems to me that a laptop (portable PC) meets my requirements for hardware and the Windows eco-system, closest to the level of integration I need, but handwriting is extremely important and the shell format is often inconvenient. Acecad DigiMemo L2 also has good potential as an input device, allowing you to take full advantage of paper and pen, but it lacks some other features that I would like to have.

How to document your projects? Do you know an app that meets my needs?

Ps. I look forward to the minuses, it looks like this is such a national fun - minus the translations.