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PCB Components
Circuit Board Design and BOM Management in Low Volume PCB Assembly
What’s the difference between Angry Birds and SpongeBob? I’m probably at an age where I shouldn’t be caring about these things, but choosing the wrong character for my son’s 5th birthday cake could spell disaster. As a designer, you probably can’t relate to my need to carefully consider the repercussions of choosing SpongeBob. However, you might understand it better knowing that I apply the same level of caution when designing for low volume
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PCB Layout Constraints That Help Manage Component Obsolescence
Just about everyone in the world of engineering has heard some variation of the “Iron Triangle” theory. It’s a popular way to talk about what is or isn’t possible among those given the task of getting things done. Basically, it is a philosophy that says you can get something done fast, cheap, or good; pick two. For example, when designing a PCB for an aircraft, cheap goes out the window, fast takes a back seat and quality is paramount
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Designing General PCB Controller for your Circuit Board Layout
I always thought that to be successful you need to emulate the success of others. When I started my career, there weren’t any single board computers like Raspberry Pi, and no one took Arduino seriously for industrial applications. You can imagine how bad it was the first time I did maintenance on a general purpose controller that I designed. It was a fire alarm controller that had over 50 wires manually screwed onto it. I had to replace a faulty
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How NASA Plans to Use 3D PCB Technology and Designs for Space Missions
Editorial credit: Tony Craddock / Shutterstock.com Have you noticed how a 3D model has become a phenomenon? People seem to want to 3D print anything they can now. Maybe the 3D printing craze will collide with the Internet of Things and we’ll get a printed smart fork. While other people are writing about the 50 best things you can make with them and then throw away, I’m going to tell you how NASA hopes to use 3D printing. Between a rocket
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Important Features to Consider When You're Comparing and Recomparing PCB Design Software
Anyone who knows me knows that I hate shopping. This is as true for lab equipment and software as it is for clothes and cars. At my lowest of lows I’ve had meltdowns in the mall, and had to call a cab while my friends were still going strong. Now when I shop, I like to get something as close to perfect for me as possible, so that I don’t have to repeat the experience for a long time. So, if I’m looking for ECAD software, what features and support
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Altium Vault Design And Library Migration Guide
LIBRARIES AND DATA This guide provides insight into design project migration into Altium Vault. Library Management in Altium Vault is inspired by modern data management systems. Rather than simply lists of components, their designs are enriched by revisions, lifecycle management and traceability of relationships between models, components, library files, and projects. Altium Vault Design and Library Migration Guide Centralization is also improved
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Altium Vault Evaluation Guide
To learn more about this topic please see the full solution - Evaluating Altium Vault - at Altium.com.
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Data Management in Four Steps
When it comes to electronics design, data management is at the bottom of most engineers’ priority list. When you first enter the engineering field, you don’t learn about all the tiny details you need to keep track of during the design process. These minute details build up into the mountain that is data management. Something as simple as finding a previously used part can mean spending your day fumbling between spreadsheets, approved lists, and
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Design Data: Organize to Optimize
You’re Only as Strong as Your Weakest Link As engineers, we tend to focus on the end technology and forget about the important ECAD design data that actually makes up our designs. The links between technology and design data create something greater than the sum of their . We often overlook the benefits of establishing solid links between our design technology and our design data. The truth is data management provides organization, traceability
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Professional PCB Design Data
Your PCB design is like a novel. The words of that novel are the buildings blocks you use. You wouldn’t write a novel without defining the language structure; you need syntax, grammar, organization, and diction. You know everything that you want to place in your design, you just have to define it. Once you define the in your ECAD environment, keeping them all organized in libraries can be a challenge. We tend to focus on the end product of our
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Complete Component Library Management for PCB Design Data
Complete Management Components are the basic building blocks of designs and even the slightest discrepancy can derail your whole design process. If one bad footprint makes its way through manufacturing, the rest of your design can be invalidated with necessary layout changes. Worst of all, you’ll have to identify everywhere a bad component has been utilized across several designs. The work required to change your layout grows exponentially the
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