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PCB Data Management is a journey with no final destination. On this journey, significant issues can and often pop up. If you decide to ignore them, they can worsen and ultimately lead to completely ruining your PCB data management systems and processes. In this blog, we will look at several of these issues. I prefer to call them pitfalls because they can appear suddenly, and you can easily fall into them if you’re not careful. But, if you are...

I get a gut-wrenching feeling when people are doing PCB Design and ignoring all the warning signs around them. It’s like in the movies. I enjoy watching horror movies, but too many times I find them more funny and predictable than scary. Why is it every time the “bad guy” starts to chase the unfortunate helpless victim, their automatic response is to run to the top floor of the building? Everyone is shocked when the person meets their “unseen”...

In this episode we’re filming at Michigan Tech with guest Dr. Chris Middlebrook who teaches a class on Printed Circuit Fabrication. Watch or listen in on our first OnTrack Field Trip as we sit down in Dr. Middlebrook’s lab, where they make circuit boards right on campus. We talk about students, the education program at Michigan Tech and all the hands-on work they do to prepare Electrical Engineers for the real world. Listen to the Podcast: ...

You can avoid some manual circuit tests with a boundary scan test On simple boards with few components and surface-level traces, you can probably test all aspects of your board by hand without much difficulty. Imagine you needed to do this with a multilayer PCB, and you’ll see that there are many aspects of a manufactured and assembled board that cannot be tested by hand. With more advanced boards, where traces are embedded in the interior...

  What if you set two cell phones next to each other and suddenly neither of them worked properly? Thankfully, this doesn’t happen because designers and manufacturers made serious efforts to ensure these devices comply with EMC standards on conducted and radiated EMI. Any device should comply with EMC standards before it makes it to the marketplace. While this sounds complicated, you have a number of simple design strategies to help your next...

The Kramer Kronig relationship is basically a way to go back and forth from the real and imaginary parts of a function. That’s it. So when someone says “blah blah blah must conform to the Kramer-Kronig relationship”, it’s a statement that is stating the obvious. Similar statements are, dogs must be part of the canine family and thus canis genus or petrol must have come from petroleum deposit on earth. Both correct and mildly interesting...

If you need to have network access from sensors which need more than a little bandwidth, cellular can get quite expensive. There are quite a few long-range wireless systems that are targeted towards sensors, however, trade bandwidth for range. If you need to stream video, send pictures, or have a constant stream of data from a range of sensors these wireless links might not be suitable. WiFi has rather limited range by comparison but does have...