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            On Track Newsletter September 2017 VOL. 1 No 6   Welcome to the September edition of Altium’s On Track Newsletter. This month PCB designer extraordinaire, Susy Webb, shares her tireless passion and continual pursuit of excellence in Design Like a Girl. In the On Track video series, John Magyar illustrates why 3D is a truly powerful tool and not just a gimmick for designers. Lastly, we take a peek inside the...

Real-time solutions with management tools Cafeterias in colleges, summer camps, and schools are often known for serving up food that has a consistent quality and similar ingredients. For the kids who are tired of eating spaghetti with meatballs, this approach to food production is a downer. However, from a manufacturing point of view, using standard ingredients with minimal variety makes for efficient production. This is also true in circuit...

John Magyar, an expert in complex PCBs, explains 3D features in PCB design software that help to resolve common problems earlier in the design process. What if routine placement issues could be discovered early? Welcome to the future of PCB design. You can now export a full 3D assembly and that's no gimmick! Learn more about working in 3D PCB design tools here: https://www.altium.com

In response to a grassroots swell of “makers”, Maker Media launched the first Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. By 2014 over 215,000 attendees flocked to their two flagship events in New York city and San Francisco. Over the years, these large events spawned Featured Maker Faires, Mini-Maker Faires and School Maker Faires all around the world. If you’ve not heard of or been to a Maker Faire, I think their website describes it...

Judy Warner: Susy, tell us about where you work and what kind of PCBs you design? Susy Webb: I work for Fairfield Nodal in Houston, which makes oil exploration and monitoring equipment for land and ocean environments. The devices we make are spread out in an area and pick up energy waves that are sent down into the earth and return. Those energy waves can be interpreted and give an idea if there may be oil deposits in the earth in a given area...

Editorial credit: Vasin Lee / Shutterstock.com While I don’t crave the latest iPhone X—the one where Apple removed the home button—it sure brought me down memory lane to my first mobile phone. I’ll always have a soft spot for that flip phone, but what I won’t miss is carrying my phone, a digital camera, and an MP3 player with me everywhere I went. Smartphones, which brought these key features—and more—into one device, seem like an inevitable...

Most of my friends in engineering live a balanced lifestyle. However, there are some engineers that are workaholics. These engineers do not limit their working hours and are constantly dealing with stress. Their lifestyle is not so different from an LED’s that is directly connected to a power supply without a current limiting resistor or with the wrong resistor value. They start out strong, but eventually flicker and burn out. In the...

For many businesses, drawing creation is a critical step that may be neglected during product development. Sometimes, these drawings just take too long to create due to the level of detail involved. In other cases, companies might rely on an external contractor or their manufacturer to create their drawings. Alternatively, electronics companies that are creating their own drawings are usually doing so with mechanical drafting applications, which...