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Keep Learning, Tackling 3D and Making and Hacking! OnTrack Newsletter September 2017

Keep Learning, Tackling 3D and Making and Hacking! OnTrack Newsletter September 2017 On Track Newsletter September 2017 VOL. 1 No 6 Welcome to the September edition of Altium’s On Track Newsletter. This month PCB designer extraordinaire, Susy Webb, shares her tireless passion and continual pursuit of excellence in Design Like a Girl. In the On Track video series, John Magyar illustrates why 3D is a truly powerful tool and not just a gimmick for designers. Lastly, we take a peek inside the wild and wonderful world of makers and Read Article

How PCB BOM Management Can Reduce Delays in Manufacturing

PCB BOM Management: Spend Less Time on Your BOM and Reduce Delays in Manufacturing Real-time solutions with management tools Cafeterias in colleges, summer camps, and schools are often known for serving up food that has a consistent quality and similar ingredients. For the kids who are tired of eating spaghetti with meatballs, this approach to food production is a downer. However, from a manufacturing point of view, using standard ingredients with minimal variety makes for efficient production. This is also true in circuit Read Article

Facial Recognition and Its Applications in the Internet of Things and Wearables

Facial Recognition Applications in IoT Wearables One of the coolest tech things I saw in movies and couldn’t wait to see in the real world was retina scanning. I want to feel like James Bond or some other spy when I unlock my house or go into my office at work. I never thought biometrics could get any cooler than that, but Apple expanded my horizons the other day. The new iPhone X is equipped with state-of-the-art 3D IOT face recognition technology. Using a variety of sensors, they’re now able Read Article

3D PCB Design: A Gimmick or Feature? John Magyar, an expert in complex PCBs, explains 3D features in PCB design software that help to resolve common problems earlier in the design process. What if routine placement issues could be discovered early? Welcome to the future of PCB design. You can now export a full 3D assembly and that's no gimmick! Learn more about working in 3D PCB design tools here: https://www.altium.com Watch Video

PCB Design Tools at Maker Faire Open Source Hardware Summit

PCB Design Tools at Maker Faire Open Source Hardware Summit In response to a grassroots swell of “makers”, Maker Media launched the first Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. By 2014 over 215,000 attendees flocked to their two flagship events in New York city and San Francisco. Over the years, these large events spawned Featured Maker Faires, Mini-Maker Faires and School Maker Faires all around the world. If you’ve not heard of or been to a Maker Faire, I think their website describes it Read Article

Susy Webb On Self-guided Learning, Success and PCB Design Conferences

Susy Webb On Self-guided Learning, Success and PCB Design Conferences Judy Warner: Susy, tell us about where you work and what kind of PCBs you design? Susy Webb: I work for Fairfield Nodal in Houston, which makes oil exploration and monitoring equipment for land and ocean environments. The devices we make are spread out in an area and pick up energy waves that are sent down into the earth and return. Those energy waves can be interpreted and give an idea if there may be oil deposits in the earth in a given area Read Article

PCB Solutions: Why a Single PCB Standalone Door Access Control System Is Not a Secure Design

PCB Solutions: Why a Single PCB Standalone Door Access Controllers System Is Not a Secure Design Editorial credit: Vasin Lee / Shutterstock.com While I don’t crave the latest iPhone X—the one where Apple removed the home button—it sure brought me down memory lane to my first mobile phone. I’ll always have a soft spot for that flip phone, but what I won’t miss is carrying my phone, a digital camera, and an MP3 player with me everywhere I went. Smartphones, which brought these key features—and more—into one device, seem like an inevitable Read Article

PCB Design Intent

Conveying Your PCB Design Intent with PCBA Drawing Creation in Draftsman For many businesses, drawing creation is a critical step that may be neglected during product development. Sometimes, these drawings just take too long to create due to the level of detail involved. In other cases, companies might rely on an external contractor or their manufacturer to create their drawings. Alternatively, electronics companies that are creating their own drawings are usually doing so with mechanical drafting applications, which Read Article

Where Will the Next Generation of PCB Designers Come From? OnTrack Newsletter August 2017

Where Will the Next Generation of PCB Designers Come From? OnTrack Newsletter August 2017 On Track Newsletter August 2017 VOL. 1 No 5 Welcome to the August edition of Altium’s On Track Newsletter. It seems like every electronics industry event where PCB designers gather, the conversation inevitably drifts to questions about where the next generation of PCB designers are going to come from. The old guard is retiring, yet their replacements don’t appear to be filling the vacancies they leave behind. From my perspective, I see many ways Read Article

49 AltiumLive Summit Munich Watch Video

49 AltiumLive Summit San Diego Watch Video

Introduction to High Speed PCB Designing: Is FR-4 the Best Board Material Choice for High Speed PCB Design?

Introduction to High Speed PCB Designing: Is FR-4 the Best High Speed Material Choice for High Speed PCB Design? We’ve all been there at one time or another when we’re tasked with a project that lies outside our comfort zone. For me, that day came when my boss asked me to design a high speed board. While I considered myself to be a somewhat experienced PCB designer, I knew that high speed PCB design has many restrictions that you do not normally encounter when you’re designing an average circuit. Initially I invested time into making my schematics Read Article

Maximizing PCB Cooling with Best Design Practices for Surface Mount Heat Sinks: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites

Maximizing PCB Cooling with Best Design Practices for Surface Mount Heat Sinks: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: Maximizing PCB Cooling with Best Design Practices For Surface Mount Heat Sinks. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us Read Article

Using Grounding to Protect Your PCB from ESD Damage: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites

Using Grounding to Protect Your PCB from ESD Damage: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: Using Grounding to Protect Your PCB From ESD Damage. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you think in the Read Article

Considerations for Designing a High Voltage PCB: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites

Considerations for Designing a High Voltage PCB: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: Considerations for Designing a High Voltage PCB. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you think in the Read Article

How to Optimize Your Design for Product Serviceability: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites

How to Optimize Your Design for Product Serviceability: PCB Design Tips & Tricks - Altium Audio Bites Altium Audio Bites, giving you bite-sized information that's easy to digest and apply to your everyday design tasks. From our PCB Design Tips & Tricks audio series here is: How to Optimize Your Design for Product Serviceability. All our audio series are from real PCB designers in the field, detailing their day to day problems and experiences. We hope you can learn from this as much as we have. Give it a listen and let us know what you think in Read Article

PCB Circuit Design Tips: Standard vs. Specialized Component Selection

PCB Circuit Design Tips: Standard vs. Specialized Component Selection in PCB Design As a kid, I was fascinated by hovercrafts. These nearly frictionless vehicles go from land to water without pause and spin 360s on demand like a carnival ride. I knew that the cost of a full-scale build would require mowing every yard in the county, so instead, I started by constructing a homemade radio-controlled model. It worked beautifully on ponds and flat parking lots, but in our hilly corner of the woods, the sleek craft required all of the Read Article