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Recent Articles
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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High Speed Design Techniques: Schematic Considerations
With my apologies to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein for borrowing their lyrics, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start…” In this case, however, we are going to be looking at high frequency and high speed PCB design techniques instead of a Hollywood musical, and the beginning happens to be the schematic. You may argue that the place to start would be on the ground plane itself. Board materials, layer stackup planning
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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
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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
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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
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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
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A Comparison of Active Cooling Techniques for Electronic Equipment
Cooling of electronic equipment is pretty important. I know this because part of my laptop’s motherboard melted once. I bought a new top-of-the-line computer back in 2010 to try out a new graphics-intensive video game. It came with an amazing graphics card, but an undersized thermal management system to hang. I should have known there was a problem when the keyboard got too hot to touch when I started playing games. Soon afterward, my computer
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How to Plan Your PCB Layout for a High Voltage Design
I used to trail run with a friend who is an urban planner. As part of her devious plan to get me to run further before I was too tired and bored, she’d tell me about the various considerations that go into the zoning and construction in a town. There were also a lot of shenanigans with local politics that provided a juicy distraction. Although my friend would disagree, a high voltage PCB layout have some similarities to complex urban planning. In
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DRCs in PCB Design: How They Can Save Your Design from Sinking
For many years I owned a small boat which gave me hours of fun on the water, but there are a few critical rules that have to be obeyed. One of those rules is that you MUST install the drain plug before putting your boat in the water. It’s a lot cheaper to go for a swim intentionally, rather than unexpectedly in order to retrieve your new boat. Everyone knows that rules are there for our protection. But sometimes, whether accidentally or on
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Considerations for Designing a High Voltage PCB
I used to think that high voltage applications were only used in power engineering. Since I had no desire to work at a power plant or transformer station, I was safe from having to learn high voltage PCB design considerations. Alas, my interest in space applications proved me wrong and forced me to confront my laziness. It turns out high voltage applications show up in almost every industry, from manufacturing and power plants to medical and
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IoT Hardware Boards and Platforms Are Becoming Flexible
Do you remember all the fads and obsessions you had when you were a kid? When I was younger everyone was going crazy for Pokemon and whatever electronic gadgets they could get their hands on. These two crazes eventually combined into one ultimate trend, the Tamagotchi. It was a huge hit, building on the portable electronic fever and children’s love of tiny unrealistic animals. Recently two fads in the PCB world have combined, flexible electronics
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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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PCB Circuit Products: Should You Design for Repairing?
As an engineer, I always feel like it’s a personal failing when I have to call someone else in to fix my stuff. Whether it’s electronics or the occasional bit of haphazard woodwork, I can’t ask for help until I’ve tried to sort it out. Plumbing, however, is another story. Then I call for help immediately. The problem with the impulse to fix your own stuff is that a lot of companies don’t actually want you to. I can’t count the number of times
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