BOM Automation: The Benefits of Having an Automated Bill of Materials in Project Management I have some friends who founded a startup company to create and market a brilliant new product. Their product quickly became a success, but all their hard work was constantly undermined by communication issues between departments. It wasn’t long until the engineers found their creative hands tied, purchasing was buried under an avalanche of unreliable documentation, and the product build-in manufacturing was slowed to a crawl from incorrect and Read Article Using Flyback Diodes in Relays Prevents Electrical Noise in Your Circuits What is a flyback diode, and how does a flyback diode protect a circuit? When used properly, flyback diodes can reduce electrical noise and prevent flyback voltages from building up. Read Article The Benefits of a Bill of Materials In Supply Chain Management Some of the most complicated engineering projects I’ve worked on were made up of multiple layers of sub-assemblies. Before we could order parts for a new assembly, we needed to go through every component in each tier of the final product to ensure that they would meet the rigorous current, voltage, and temperature derating requirements for different customer applications. The first few times I had to do this, it was by merging dozens of excel Read Article BOM Part Number Management: Why It Should Be Automated If you’ve ever worked with high voltages or have designed a high voltage circuit, you know that they always require careful planning. In my last job, we had been using a particular high voltage power supply circuit for years. When it was initially designed, the board took longer than usual to complete. While its design required some extra finicking, it was worth the effort. Everything was going well until the larger assembly's design was modified Read Article What Materials to Include in Your Bill of Materials As an electrical engineer, I am constantly impressed with the brilliant designs my colleagues come up with. I’m also constantly shocked to see how mismanaged most of their BOMs are. I’ve been on projects with a huge range of practices for handling a bill of materials. On one end of the spectrum, there was my senior design project, with no BOM at all, just a series of sticky notes my group placed on the front cover flap of our notebooks. Protip Read Article Why Designing a High Voltage PCB for Rapid Prototyping Is More Effective Than Rushing to Form Factor Remember that fable we all were told as kids about the tortoise and the hare? The moral of the story was that slow and steady wins the race. In engineering, this is especially true when it comes to creating a consumer product quickly. However, this practice is rarely the approach we take. I personally experienced this when I rushed the design of a dimmer for the IOT market. In fact, I was making two dimmers. The first dimmer was simpler and used Read Article High Speed Design Techniques: Schematic Considerations With my apologies to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein for borrowing their lyrics, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start…” In this case, however, we are going to be looking at high frequency and high speed PCB design techniques instead of a Hollywood musical, and the beginning happens to be the schematic. You may argue that the place to start would be on the ground plane itself. Board materials, layer stackup planning Read Article How To Design Internet Of Things Devices: Make Them Simple and Universal Greed is a natural human tendency that promises much but often leaves us with nothing. My father grew up in a gold rich area of Africa. A miner once told my father and his friends that they could keep as much of his gold as they could carry by hand for 5 miles. My father and his friends each took their turns, but all of them tried to carry too much and couldn’t even make it one mile. The temptation to attempt too much, or keep too much to oneself Read Article How to Prevent Silkscreen Placement Errors in PCB Manufacturing: 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 Prevent Silkscreen Placement Errors in PCB Manufacturing. 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 Read Article High Speed PCB Design Guidelines: An Overview for Getting Started One of the most common questions I receive from new designers and new hardware developers relates to the differences between high-speed digital designs and any other circuit board. Everyone naturally assumes the clock frequency defines the limit where we consider a design to be operating at high speed, but this is not the whole story. High speed designs can be identified by the presence of two common characteristics: The presence of standardized Read Article Virtual Prototyping Versus Traditional Product Development Methods Best-in-Class companies who utilize simulation and virtual prototyping are notably outperforming their peers who continue to use more traditional methods of product development. By discussing the three primary methods used to predict product performance (physical prototyping, manual calculation, and virtual prototyping software) this article demonstrates how simulation software is the superior choice for successfully addressing the increasingly Read Article How to Optimize Your Design for Product Serviceability Have you ever gone into a situation thinking that you’re totally prepared, only to come out of it feeling like you are totally clueless? Unfortunately, I have experienced this more times than I would like to recount. This was especially the case when I started designing products for serviceability or design for repair. There are many factors to consider before you decide whether your product should be designed for serviceability, and you should Read Article The SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition: Growing the Next Generation of Electronics Designers In 2013, when Elon Musk unveiled the concept of the Hyperloop as a future form of transportation, he immediately challenged private industry and universities from around the world to develop the technology and pods. (After all, he has his hands full these days!) Since that time, SpaceX has hosted two Hyperloop pod competitions consisting of university teams at their headquarters in Torrance, CA. These events afford three lucky teams the chance to Read Article PCB Design Guidelines for Designing Solar Powered Embedded Systems Have you ever gone on a vacation and felt like you needed another one immediately after? I sure do, my last beach holiday was completely ruined by constant thunderstorms. Unpredictable weather always is always a dilemma when I’m planning ahead for my next vacation, especially if it involves outdoor activities. I take the same cautious approach when I’m designing solar-powered embedded systems intended for outdoor applications. It is a totally Read Article How to Find the Best PCB Layout Help for Your Specific Design Questions Have you ever heard stories about the gamblers in the Wild West pulling an ace out of their sleeve in order to cash in with the winning hand? Even though it’s not the most moral example I’ve ever used, the principle here is still a good one. Always make sure that you have something in your pocket that you can draw from when you need it. And this is just as important for us as designers as it is in everyday life. At some point, everyone needs help Read Article High Voltage PCB Design for Arc Prevention: How to Manage Pads and Traces Growing up, I’d work obsessively on jigsaw puzzles with my grandmother. Like, skipping dinner obsessively. She was a grandmaster of puzzles; you only got to look at the picture once when you took the pieces out. If you needed more than your memory and pattern recognition, that was cheating. Instead of facing the shame of looking at the box, I learned to focus on the shapes of the pieces, and how each fit with its neighbors. That way, not knowing Read Article How to Reduce Power Consumption in Embedded Systems With Deep Sleep SRAM Editorial credit: DFree / Shutterstock.com One of my favorite musical groups is the French DJ duo Daft Punk. One of the quirks of Daft Punk is that they pretend to be robots and perform all their shows in awesome robot costumes. In 2013 they released their album Random Access Memories, or RAM, to play on the robotic theme. However, they failed to specify exactly which kind of RAM. You and I know that in the world of embedded systems the type of Read Article Pagination First page « First Previous page ‹‹ Page170 Current page171 Page172 Page173 Page174 Page175 Next page ›› Last page Last » Load More