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 3D PCB Design: Why You Need It and How It Will Help You The other day I watched as a young father was entertaining his one-year old son on his shoulders. Securely held by his dad, the boy would constantly move from side trying to get different views of his father. In an overload of cuteness, he would first look at his dad over the left side of his face, then play with his hair, move over to the right side, then go back to where he started from. I thoroughly enjoyed watching this precious moment, but Read Article Are Fiducial Marker Placements on PCBs Still Necessary with Modern Manufacturing Capabilities? In PCB design, a fiducial marker is a rounded shape of copper that acts as a reference point for pick and place assembly machines. Fiducial PCB markers help machines recognize the orientation of the PCB as it passes through SMT. Based on the PCB orientation and the prior orientation of components on reels, the machine can be programmed to rotate components by specific amounts to ensure accurate placement on their land patterns. Placement of Read Article SpaceX’s Hyperloop Pod Competition: The Pod Flight Heard Around the World Judy Warner and Benjamin Kitzinger of Altium If I had any question I am a total geek, all doubt was dispelled yesterday when I entered the gates to the Hyperloop Pod Competition II held at SpaceX headquarters in Torrance, California. I felt exactly like a giddy 8-year-old clearing the turnstile at Disneyland for the first time. Then, when the WARR Hyperloop team set the new pod world speed record, at 324 km/h ( just over 200 mph), I nearly Read Article Why You Should Use PCB Assembly Variants for Multiple Design Configurations Years ago I was working on a design that had been copied from an existing board, but there was a problem. A few of the circuits on my layout didn’t match what the engineer had in his schematic. This generated a lot of confusion. We eventually tracked the problem down to some edits that had been made to the board after the design had been approved and sent to fabrication. An inadvertent change to the board while creating an assembly variation had Read Article How to Prevent Silkscreen Placement Errors in PCB Manufacturing Make sure to leverage the DRC system in your CAD software to catch and solve PCB silkscreen errors. Read Article 3D Printing versus Real Time, Pre-Build Clearance Checking 3D printing has been revolutionizing the manufacturing industry. Once you have your completed design, just feed it into your printer and press a button, and it can be fabricated automatically. 3D printing is used for fast and easy prototyping of all sorts of complex and intricate items. So why not use it to fabricate your completed printed circuit board designs? Well, because when it comes to PCBs, there’s a better way. The Problem with 3D Read Article PCB Design Process: The EDA Design Approach - OnTrack In this episode, Chris Carlson gives an overview of the process flow of PCB design. An expert in PCB design, Chris discusses the toolchain a product needs to go through during development. What are the limitations of typical processes and is there a better way? Get the most effective information on PCB design and Electronic Design Automation. If you find this video interesting, please like and share with your fellow PCB designers. Read the Watch Video Pagination First page « First Previous page ‹‹ Page174 Current page175 Page176 Page177 Page178 Page179 Next page ›› Last page Last » Load More
