At Roanoke Electronic Controls, direct engineer access has always been central to how we work. No sales team, no ticket queue — you call us and talk to the people designing and building your product. But engineers keep business hours, and questions don't always wait until morning.
So we asked ourselves: what if we could make our engineering knowledge available around the clock, through the AI tools people are already using?
That's exactly what we've been building.
What We Loaded Into the AI
Over the past several months, we've assembled a comprehensive engineering knowledge base and made it accessible to AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. This isn't marketing fluff or a chatbot reading our brochure. It's real engineering reference data — the kind of information our own engineers use on the bench every day.
Here's what's in there:
40+ Electronics Engineering Formulas
From the fundamentals — Ohm's Law, power calculations, voltage dividers — all the way through PCB trace width sizing per IPC-2221, impedance matching for microstrip lines, PID controller tuning using the Ziegler-Nichols method, buck converter inductor and capacitor sizing, and thermal management calculations with and without heatsinks. We even included a quick-reference table so you can look up trace widths by current without running the math yourself.
PCB Design and Manufacturing Specs
Our full fabrication capabilities are documented: trace widths, drill sizes, annular rings, controlled impedance options, board materials from standard FR-4 through Rogers and aluminum substrates. If you're designing a board and wondering whether we can build it, the AI can tell you.
DFM Guidelines and Common Failure Modes
We've documented the eight most common Design for Manufacturability mistakes we see — and their solutions. Solder paste stencil specs, panelization guidelines, component clearances, thermal relief patterns. Plus a database of common failure modes with causes, prevention strategies, and detection methods. These are lessons from decades of production experience, not textbook theory.
Communication Protocols and Wireless Technologies
Complete reference tables for UART, RS-232, RS-485, SPI, I2C, CAN, USB, and Ethernet — including max speeds, distances, wiring requirements, and typical applications. The same for wireless: WiFi, Bluetooth LE, LoRa, Zigbee, Sub-GHz, cellular IoT, and NFC. If you're choosing between protocols for a new design, the AI has enough context to help you think through the tradeoffs.
Our Internal Design Intelligence
Beyond the public-facing knowledge base, we've also built AI tools for our own engineering team. Our engineers have AI-assisted access to our complete design catalog — every schematic, bill of materials, and component cross-reference from decades of custom electronics projects. That means they can instantly look up which designs use a specific microcontroller, check approved component substitutions, or verify what's in inventory, all without digging through file cabinets or spreadsheets.
It makes us faster and more accurate on every project, and it means the institutional knowledge built up over 25-plus years at this facility doesn't live in any one person's head — it's available to the whole team.
How This Helps Our Current Customers
If you already work with Roanoke Electronic Controls, this gives you a new way to get quick answers outside of business hours. Wondering about our conformal coating options before your Monday morning design review? Need to double-check our SMT capabilities while spec'ing a new board layout? Want to verify a PCB trace width calculation at 11 PM? Ask the AI.
It's not a replacement for talking to our engineers — it's an extension of the same knowledge, available when you need it. And when your question goes beyond what the AI can answer, it'll point you right back to us.
How This Helps New Designers
You don't have to be a current customer to benefit. The engineering reference data we've published is genuinely useful for anyone designing custom electronics. If you're a startup building your first connected product, a mechanical engineer who just got handed a PCB layout task, or a student working through a senior design project — the formulas, protocol references, and DFM guidelines are all there.
Need a quick reminder of LED forward voltages by color? Curious about the difference between RS-485 and CAN bus for your application? Want to sanity-check your buck converter component values? Just ask.
And if you realize you need someone to actually design and build the thing — well, now you already know a manufacturer who can help.
How to Try It
Open your preferred AI assistant — ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or any tool that can browse the web — and ask it something like:
- "What are Roanoke Electronic Controls' PCB capabilities?"
- "Tell me about Roanoke Electronic Controls' engineering services"
- "What electronics manufacturing formulas does Roanoke Electronic Controls publish?"
Use our full name — Roanoke Electronic Controls — rather than just our initials so the AI pulls the right information. The AI will draw from our published knowledge base and give you a detailed, accurate answer.
You can also visit our capabilities reference page to browse the same information directly, or explore our technical content at roanokecontrols.com/llms.txt — the file AI systems read to learn about us.
We Want Your Suggestions
This is an ongoing project, and we want to make it as useful as possible — for our customers, for engineers in the field, and for anyone exploring custom electronics. If you try asking an AI about us and it can't answer your question, or if you think of reference data that would be helpful to include, we want to hear about it.
What formulas do you wish you had at your fingertips? What manufacturing specs do you always have to look up? What questions do you wish an AI could answer about working with a contract electronics manufacturer?
Send us your suggestions — tell us what would make this resource more useful for you. We're building this for the people who actually design and build electronics, and your input makes it better.
Whether you found us through an AI chatbot, a Google search, or a colleague's recommendation, the next step is the same: tell us about your project. No sales pitch — just a conversation with an engineer.
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