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We’re coming in for a wild ride in 2019. The last few years have been pretty crazy, and 2019 looks to continue to amplify this highly innovative and disruptive trend. While some may be nervous about trends in technology such as artificial intelligence, I'm still quite optimistic. The most long-term successful aspects of our civilization are those that rip apart on a regular basis. Frequent disruption allows for people to start anew and create...

In this interview I talk with Nathanael Beaudoin-Dion, Avionics lead for the Oronos Polytechnique Rocket team from Polytechnique Montreal Technical University. Each year in June, Oronos competes in the Spaceport America Cup, the world’s largest rocketry competition which takes place in New Mexico at the only commercial spaceport in the world. Enjoy this article as well as the photos of their rockets and videos from this inspiring team. Judy...

Draftsman® has been a valuable asset to designers since Altium Designer 16. Although some users may have found it to be incomplete due to their unique board requirements, Draftsman has helped many designs go to production. Since its introduction Draftsman has evolved more and more into what it is today: a robust, stable, and powerful PCB drawing editor, specifically made to help designers automate their fabrication and assembly drawing process...

            OnTrack Newsletter  JANUARY 2019  VOL. 2 No 9       “AT YOUR SERVICE” Insights from a PCB Design Service Bureau   ...

A few weeks ago, we covered the general advantages of switching from a desktop-based environment to the cloud for collaboration. Emails can get lost. Attachments can be deleted or forgotten. Merging multiple changes is difficult. The cloud addresses all of those challenges in collaboration. Now, we talked a lot about files and the challenges that come with them in that post. Frankly, the issues in that post are relevant to almost any scenario...

SRAM loses its data when power is removed. One of the best inventions in editing software is the autosave feature, which prevents Murphy’s Law from striking at the worst time. Decades ago, I nearly cried when several pages of an important university assignment were literally wiped out, as the non-existence of the autosave feature was made worse by my reluctance to hit the ‘Save’ button. In electronics, you risk losing the entire data stored...

In my university days, high-speed internet was non-existent. Online gaming was often limited to Starcraft or Warcraft, played over the Local Area Network (LAN). Friends would gather and start battling each other from different computers within a house, with cries of victories reverberating through the walls. It’s possible to be an awful Warcraft player and still design great PCBs. However, if you fail to understand the LAN and its underlying...

New Year’s resolutions are often the focus of humor as people admit that they are difficult to keep. The old joke is; “last year I resolved to lose 15 pounds, only 20 more to go.” The important thing about resolutions though is that they show that you are taking charge of something in your life. Diet, exercise, learning, or whatever, the point is that you have seen something that needs to change and you are committing yourself to make it happen...