Specialty Product Design and Manufacturing Duplicates Success Across Campaigns No matter what stage of business you’re at, if one of your designs has turned from circuit board ideation to fully manufactured product then you’ve already accomplished a great deal. But, the hardware arena that you reside in will always have opportunities for product development, expansion, and growth. There are a handful of considerations that should be taken into account before you get too giddy. Product designs, to be specialized, have to Read Article Surface Finishes on Printed Circuit Boards with Mike Carano, Chemist and Expert on Surface Finishes Curious about what Surface Finish to use? Many PCB Designers are! Lucky for you we have an expert in Surface Finishes on this episode of the OnTrack Podcast to give you insights and tips, listen now. Read Article Menu Changes and Switching Units in Altium Designer When I was a kid, the one place I always felt safe and secure was at home. Regardless of what happened outside, my childhood home was my refuge and I wanted to live there with my parents forever. Of course, as I grew older, I longed to do new things, meet new people, and have new experiences, but to do so meant changing where I lived. Just as I had to embrace change to grow as a person, it is sometimes necessary to make changes in order to Read Article Strength of BOM Applications for Everything from Hobby Boards to Large Systems I’m currently building a new tool shed and I was fortunate enough to find some plans for exactly what I need. Or at least I thought that I was fortunate until I started noticing some errors in the plans. At one point it instructed me to cut two door headers to a precise measurement, but that measurement was wrong and the headers ended up too short for assembly. I must confess, I may have uttered a few choice words concerning those shed plans on Read Article Sporty 3D Component Part Models Drivers for Layout in PCB Design Driving for most of us is an intuitive utility given the majority’s need to move around our current infrastructure. Many of us don’t think twice as we grab the car keys and head to the store for another latte. Although complex machines, drivers intuitively rely on fingertip commands to move the car down the road. Using PCB layout tools could be the same with cleverly built platforms emphasizing ease of use over knowledge of intricate operational Read Article IOT Security Modules: Modular Hardware for Software Engineers From PCB designed in CircuitStudio to Zymbit finished product The Internet of Things - Big Promise or Big Problem? By 2023 the IoT promises to be 50 billion connected devices strong, transacting $8 Trillion of economic value! That’s orders of magnitude bigger and much more complex than anything we have seen before, and current models of development, deployment, device management and IoT security don’t easily translate to this new world disorder Read Article PCB Layout Considerations: Differential Pair Length Matching Tolerance and Avoiding Violations Detangling my daughter’s hair reminds me of detangling PCB traces. Everything needs to be set into layers, and crossover should be avoided. Detangling the hair of a 9-year old doesn’t take as long as routing PCB traces, but the results are just as painful if not done correctly. Ideally, though, your daughter’s hair isn’t causing short-circuiting of electronics or small fires to spark up. Routing traces in a layout is arguably the most important Read Article Using Project Templates for PCB Design Development If you've ever had the opportunity to use a bush ax to clear out an overgrown plot of land, then you have glimpsed the hardship and difficulties that early pioneers experienced as they carved paths across North America. The efforts of these pioneers were an exhibition of the best aspects of the human spirit. Although being a member of that group is no longer possible, you do have the means to be a trailblazer for the fellow PCB designer. When Read Article Mary Elizabeth McCulloch and Project Vive’s Medical Device Innovations Listen to this OnTrack Podcast Episode and find out how Mary and Project Vive are using low cost sensors and changing lives by leading the development of innovative medical devices and technology. Read Article How PCB Library Organization Expands Design Capabilities A popular children’s cartoon featured a superhero called the “Masked Retriever” who had a real job as an ordinary librarian. In the pursuit of justice, the Masked Retriever left a bold checkmark as a calling card and pursued anyone with an overdue book. In one animated adventure, the Masked Retriever pursued the most powerful man in the region by horseback because he wouldn’t give up his book. Unlike the of the Masked Retriever, PCB libraries don Read Article IoT Medical Product and Application Design: Challenges and Considerations Ideally, any technology is going to drastically affect people and the ability of people to accomplish whatever tasks they need. Yet, when new technology is entering the medical domain, the stakes are always a bit higher: one has to be cognizant that any faults, errors, or malfunctions are going to immediately affect someone’s health. Granted, not every medical device is going to be life-or-death, but they should still be considered carefully Read Article Constraint Driven Design versus Rules Driven Design in a Unified Environment Wouldn’t it be great if more rules in life were checked automatically? I love to cook Italian food, but it gets tiring going back and forth between a cookbook and a pot of tomato sauce. The only automatic rules checking mechanism in the kitchen is your oven timer. Fortunately for PCB designers, high-quality software packages include constraint and rules checking features that can check your layout and schematic automatically. The ability to set Read Article How to Create a PCB Layout from a Schematic in Altium Designer You’ve done your usual excellent job of putting together the PCB schematic. The circuitry is defined and you are ready to go to PCB layout. But this time it’s a little different. Maybe your regular layout resources aren’t available, or perhaps you want to try to do your first layout yourself. Whatever the reason, you are ready to start working on the board side of PCB design, but you’re not sure how to create it from a PCB schematic in Altium Read Article PCB Design Software: Creating a Bill of Material using Altium Designer You’ve done it, your printed circuit board is finished and ready for PCB assembly. The schematic is finalized, the layout is checked and approved and you are ready to get this thing built. To do that though, you need to create a bill of materials. Fortunately, we are long past the days where these documents were created by hand. Every CAD system out there will automatically create a bill of materials through some library or other process. But Read Article What's New In Altium Designer 18 Webinar Recap June 19 Altium Designer® Webinar: June 19th In case you missed our Altium 18 live webinar, no worries. You can catch up here with the video recording and presentation slides . If you’re not a fan of videos I’ll try my best to summarize in the webinar notes bellow. Most of the key takeaways will be the same as the may webinar but do take a look at the questions as they’ll be different. For future webinars if there’s something you’d like to see add it to Read Article PCB Routing Guidelines for DDR4 Memory Devices and Impedance Follow these DDR4 routing and PCB layout guidelines to ensure signal integrity and correct timing for high speed DDR buses. Read Article Role of the Embedded PCB Capacitor in Circuit Board Design Mention capacitance, conductors, and dielectric capacitors in PCB to a 7th-grade science class, and you may see glazed-over expressions and hear bored sighs. I mean, hey, sometimes I get this with adults and coworkers I’m talking to so I can’t say I’m unsympathetic to the kids, but I have to promise them that circuits and circuit boards are, truly, fascinating. Let's help them answer the question: why are capacitors used in circuit boards? To Read Article Pagination First page « First Previous page ‹‹ Page130 Current page131 Page132 Page133 Page134 Page135 Next page ›› Last page Last » Load More