Jeremy Blum at Shaper Tools and the CNC Router Revolutionizing Hardware Design [OnTrack Podcast]

Created: February 23, 2018
Updated: March 16, 2020

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All About PCB Tooling Holes: What They Are and Where They Go Learn all about PCB tooling holes and mounting hole styles in your design and how they are used in the PCB manufacturing process. Read Article

Your Guide to Gerber File Extensions in PCB Design Gerber files come with multiple extensions but in only two common file formats. You can learn more about Gerber file extensions in this article. Read Article

Lightning Surge Protection for Electronics On a clear fine day, the ground typically carries a slight negative charge with a corresponding positive charge in the upper atmosphere. This generates an average electric field strength around the globe in the order of 120 V/m. By comparison, just before it discharges through a lightning strike, a thunderstorm cloud generates an electric field strength in the order of 25 kV/m. This creates a potential difference between this cloud and the ground Read Article

Successful ECAD/MCAD Collaboration Practices In this article Zachariah Peterson, founder of Northwest Engineering Solutions, discusses how his company successfully collaborates with mechanical engineers outside of his firm. He shares practices and tools that have been most useful along the way. Judy Warner: Zach, as an engineer and the owner of Northwest Engineering Solutions (NWES), what challenges do you see as most prevalent and problematic for design engineers when it comes to Read Article

Creating Elegant and Readable Schematics A schematic drawing will not only tell your PCB design software what needs to connect where, but it also communicates the purpose of a circuit to other people. It’s easy to create a schematic, but it can be harder to make a helpful schematic that can be quickly and easily read and comprehended by the reader. Anyone reading your schematic diagram should not have to try and trace wires around to figure out what they do or need to unscramble a Read Article

Guide to Choosing Version Control For Your PCB Design Projects If you’re deciding on a version control system for your hardware projects, use the cloud-connected PCB design and management environment in Altium 365. Read Article

What Influences Electrolytic Capacitor Lifespan? If you speak with a bunch of design engineers, you might quickly form the opinion that the electrolytic capacitor has a particularly dubious reputation. This view certainly hasn’t been helped by the so-called “capacitor plague” that occurred in the first few years of the new millennium. A faulty electrolyte mix used in these types of capacitors led to premature device failures, and quite often, a “bit of a mess” was made to the PCBs on which they Read Article

Workspace ESD Protection Electro-Static Discharge (ESD) is essentially the sudden flow of current between two objects with a different electrical charge when there’s a conducting path between them. This could be lightning flowing from a charged cloud down to the ground via the dielectric breakdown of the air between them or that short sharp electric shock you feel when the static electricity that’s built up in your clothing flows to a metal door handle when you touch it Read Article

Must Have Rapid Prototyping Tools Suppose your job involves rapidly iterating designs or creating a wide variety of products for clients. In that case, there are some essential tools available that can save you a tremendous amount of time, bringing high engineering risk devices to completion successfully. Whether you’re working on internal projects or developing high mix devices for clients as a consulting or freelance firm, these indispensable tools will help you ship a higher Read Article

Types of PCB Soldering and the Assembly Process There are multiple types of PCB soldering used in assembly, learn more about these types of solder and processes used to apply them. Read Article

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