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Technology
Technological Development Made Easy as Pie with Historical Altium Designer
Some words constantly pop-up in daily conversation. Think about how often the word “easy” is used, whether in a bumper sticker that says, “Easy Does It” or a childhood favorite, Easy Bake Ovens. We tell people to “take it easy” and refer to New Orleans as the “Big Easy.” I’m reasonably certain that a guide or book somewhere out there proclaims the “12 Easy Steps to Becoming a Nuclear Scientist.” In a 1940s film called “The Long Voyage Home,” a
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Keep Track of Your Components with Electronic Component Database Software
Believe it or not, everyone eventually finds themselves in a situation where they can’t find something they need. You make a list of things you need to get from the grocery store, only to find that your favorite brand is out of stock. Thankfully, grocery stores give you plenty of options right there on the shelves, but you can run into long production delays if this happens when you go to manufacture your next PCB. Sourcing electronic components
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Building Your Next Multi-Level Bill of Materials
My wife and I always argue about what goes on the grocery list each week. I’m a total carnivore, while she prefers I get everything we need from local farmers. Planning out our shopping trips in multiple lists does more than just allow us to plan our Saturdays coherently, it helps ensure marital bliss. Any PCB that you intend to manufacture will need an associated bill of materials. If you’re building a complex product that includes multiple sub
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SMD LEDs in Your PCB and Your Bill of Materials
Unless you refuse to get out of the house on a Friday night (like me), you’ve probably been at a concert and had the privilege of being bathed in multi-colored lights from the stage. LED arrays provide a great concert experience, but I think that learning what makes them tick is far more interesting. Kingbright (KPKF) surface-mounted LEDs are probably my favorite LED to use on a PCB. They look clean on your board and they are available from a
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Effective Supply Chain Management through PCB Libraries and Supply Chain Integration
If only sourcing PCB components worked like e-commerce. Recommendation engines are great in that they can help you decide what to buy when your preferred item is not available. Most PCB design packages don’t have this type of functionality, which would save a massive amount of time when planning a manufacturing run. Whether you’re sourcing electronic components or some other parts for your next product, you’ll need access to updates supply chain
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Free Bill of Materials Software vs. Integrated Design Software
The first time I prepared functional requirements for a web platform, I thought the document was massively complex. I forget the number of youtube tutorials I watched on preparing this document. Now that I have prepared several of these documents for a number of startups, I could probably write functional requirements in my sleep. A bill of materials might also seem like a complex document if you have never prepared one in the past. When it comes
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Low Power Electronics: Do You Need a Battery to Keep Your Circuit Boards Online?
I was recently chatting with a friend of mine about his new hardware startup and how his progress on his new product was coming along. He was building a Bluetooth device and his first run at a prototype only kept his circuit board online for 40 minutes before draining the battery. I’ve noticed the difficulty of many IoT devices is that often they need to run for long periods of time. Whether it’s something you can wear or a sensor in a smart home
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Tips to Minimize the Effects of Differential Noise in RS485 Communication
I’ve never been a morning person and pride myself on simply getting dressed and making it to work on time. Although I typically beat the traffic and appear at the office just in time, there have been occasions when I’ve arrived wearing mismatched socks. In these situations, I walk straight to my desk and hope that my embarrassment stays unnoticed. In electronics, you might deal with a completely different type of embarrassment if you fail to keep
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How to Expand Input and Output for a Microcontrollers Circuit Board
When working through practice boards and schematics very early on in my education, I remember more than once thinking about simply increasing the board size so that I could fit my components properly and make routing easier. It definitely would not have helped, and I’m glad I persevered in finding solutions through the challenges, but there are still times in my career where I’ve looked at the necessities of devices and wished I could just make
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Build Your Next Engineering BOM With Integrated Design Software
It’s easy to collaborate on a project with a small number of people. I’ve always found that two or three people can thoroughly hash out the details on a project in person and produce great results. But as a team grows in size, you’ll spend more time reading and writing documentation. This is not necessarily a bad thing; it helps formalize processes and products across an organization and ensures that everyone can stay on the same page. Any new
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Electronic Parts Sourcing with Integrated Component Libraries
The weekend is grocery time at our house, and we always make a thorough list of everything we need for the next two weeks and where we will be buying it. You may not be as meticulous as my wife and I when it comes to buying groceries, but it pays to be thorough when you need to build a bill of materials for your PCB. Once you’ve got your design complete, you need to ask yourself: where am I going to get all of these components I just placed in my
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Identify Vendor Parts Early: Manage BoMs Proactively With Consolidated Part Sourcing
Walking a tightrope requires intricate balance. Simply visualized as a walker and a rope in space. Simple moves into complexity when the walker’s senses are skewed to balance. Careful placement of each foot pulls from neurological pathways communicating intricate information simultaneously. Should information fail to arrive when the foot is moving may push the walker off the rope. Managing Bills of Material from early circuit concept through
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What is Lenz's Law or Simulation and How Does it Affect PCB Design?
Lenz's law is one of the fundamental physical laws that describes the multitude of relationships between electricity and magnetism. Together with Ampere's law, Gauss law, Faraday's law, Coulomb's law, and the Lorentz force law, we have everything we need to understand the classical behavior of the electromagnetic field. Among these laws, Lenz's law and Faraday's law work together to describe how the magnetic field in your PCB is related to the
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What to do With Unused Pins on a Microcontroller
I must admit that I’m not exactly the right person to turn to for cleaning tips. I dread the annual spring cleaning as there are always surprises in the storerooms to deal with. Occasionally, I stumble upon items that I barely even recognize but eventually decide to hold on to. While my indecisiveness with unused items results in some nagging from my wife and loss of additional space, failing to deal with unused pins on a microcontroller can have
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Altium Vault Streamlines Product Development Process With Early Access to Component Sourcing and Costing Instead of Placeholders
The product development process for printed circuit assemblies is highly dependent on complete Bills of Material. Complete Bills of Material list the PCB along with all components soldered or adhered onto the board to make the assembly. Components are unavailable early in the product development cycle because EDA libraries are antiquated and lack current parts information when circuit designers are drawing schematics. To stay on the development’s
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PCB Manufacturing: Access Databases vs. Integrated Design Software For Bills of Materials
Building databases in programs like Access is easy enough. Access databases deserve a lot of credit for helping organize tons of information in one place. But adapting these programs to electronics design can be a real challenge. Any PCB that is intended for manufacturing must have a corresponding bill of materials. This document is critical as it lists all of information about your PCB in a standardized format. Your bill of materials contains a
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Eliminate the Crosstalk: LVDS Routing and the Art of Differential Signaling
During a typical baseball game, coaches use the silent language of hand signals to instruct batters and baserunners while catchers use similar signs to recommend pitches to pitchers. Players in the outfield and the infield use hand signals to find the right locations when anticipating the skills of a batter. Electronics has its own version of a silent language with the variety of signals exchanged almost instantaneously within a circuit. Single
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