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Explore content from blog posts to technical white papers gathered together for your convenience. All written by Altium's community of PCB design experts.

Keep Learning, Tackling 3D and Making and Hacking! OnTrack Newsletter September 2017 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 wild and wonderful world of makers and Read Article
How PCB BOM Management Can Reduce Delays in Manufacturing 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 Read Article
Facial Recognition Applications in IoT Wearables One of the coolest tech things I saw in movies and couldn’t wait to see in the real world was retina scanning. I want to feel like James Bond or some other spy when I unlock my house or go into my office at work. I never thought biometrics could get any cooler than that, but Apple expanded my horizons the other day. The new iPhone X is equip with state of the art 3D IOT face recognition technology. Using a variety of sensors, they’re now able to Read Article
7:21 3D PCB Design: A Gimmick or Feature? John Magyar, an expert in complex PCBs, explains 3D features in PCB design software that help to resolve common problems Watch Video
PCB Design Tools at Maker Faire Open Source Hardware Summit 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 Read Article
Susy Webb On Self-guided Learning, Success and PCB Design Conferences 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 Read Article
PCB Solutions: Why a Single PCB Standalone Door Access Control System Is Not a Secure Design 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. Smart phones, which brought these key features—and more—into one device, seem like an inevitable Read Article
Current Limiting Resistor LED Systems with Matching Voltage Power Supply 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 architecture Read Article
Conveying Your Design Intent with Drawing Creation in Draftsman For many businesses, drawing creation is a critical step that is often neglected during product development. Alternatively, electronics companies that are employing drawing creation are doing so with dated applications, preventing them from reaping the full benefits of smarter, more cost-effective solutions. While this step may seem discretionary, taking this extra measure can make all the difference when communicating your design intent and Read Article
Where Will the Next Generation of PCB Designers Come From? OnTrack Newsletter August 2017 On Track Newsletter August 2017 VOL. 1 No 5 Welcome to the August edition of Altium’s On Track Newsletter. It seems like every electronics industry event where PCB designers gather, the conversation inevitably drifts to questions about where the next generation of PCB designers are going to come from. The old guard is retiring, yet their replacements don’t appear to be filling the vacancies they leave behind. From my perspective, I see many ways Read Article
New Altium Documentation So just how do you avoid creating a content dinosaur? Every so often, you stand back and ask, “is this working?”. Well, we’ve done that, and the answer was no. The content was simply too old, had too much missing, there were too many mistakes, it was too hard to find anything, and would take too much work to fix! It was old content that had started life being paper/pdf-based, which had not traveled well as it first moved to a wiki, then on to a Read Article
Board Layer Stackup Considerations for High Speed Board Design I’ve been designing boards for a long time; however when I began my career, the boards I designs were pretty simple. Most of them were small low speed designs with very few restrictions on them. Test boards and control panels, I cannot tell you how many simple 2 and 4 layer boards I have designed in my career. That being said, as my skills increased, so did the complexity of the boards that I designed. A particular high point for me was when I Read Article
Introduction to High Speed PCB Designing: Is FR-4 the Best Board Material Choice for High Speed PCB Design? We’ve all been there at one time or another when we’re tasked with a project that lies outside our comfort zone. For me, that day came when my boss asked me to design a high speed board. While I considered myself to be a somewhat experienced PCB designer, I knew that high speed PCB design has many restrictions that you do not normally encounter when you’re designing an average circuit. Initially I invested time into making my schematics Read Article
Maximizing PCB Cooling with Best Design Practices for Surface Mount Heat Sinks: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: Maximizing PCB Cooling with Best Design Practices For Surface Mount Heat Sinks. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us Read Article
Using Grounding to Protect Your PCB from ESD Damage: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: Using Grounding to Protect Your PCB From ESD Damage. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you think in the Read Article
Considerations for Designing a High Voltage PCB: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: Considerations for Designing a High Voltage PCB. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you think in the Read Article
How to Optimize Your Design for Product Serviceability: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: How to Optimize Your Design for Product Serviceability. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you think in Read Article