Circuit Board Prototyping

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Using the iPad Pro for Electronic Design Altium Concord Pro® on Altium 365 was updated with a smoother, more feature-full and more intuitive interface for the web design viewer. I want to use this occasion to share with you some of my favourite apps and websites for electronic design. Read Article

Getting Through Agile Prototyping in Agile Hardware Development If you’ve worked in software development, such as in web design or enterprise software design, you know how difficult it can be to get clients to understand the look and feel of a product from a static wireframe. We’ve had the same problem in recent projects, especially when the POC was not a technical person. The client ultimately had to take it on faith that we knew what we were doing and could deliver what we promised. There’s no substitute Read Article

Exploring Arduino is Now Expanded and Updated by Jeremy Blum The Altium OnTrack Podcast with Judy Warner welcomes one of the Hardware design community’s brightest stars, Jeremy Blum. Jeremy recently released a new version of his book that is a heavily expanded and updated edition. Exploring Arduino, has helped people around the world and now you can get a completely up-to-date version, which you can buy now. Jeremy is a two-time AltiumLive keynote speaker and has also been featured on this podcast twice Read Article

Leveraging the Ecosystem Being a great designer requires discipline. Most designers love to create, and design is an end in and of itself. This is fine when you design as a hobby. After all, the point isn’t getting the project done more than it is to enjoy oneself. When you design as a business, this all changes. Usually there’s some sort of clock ticking, like you only have so much money saved up before your business needs to start generating some income to pay for Read Article

Using Low-Volume Runs to Eliminate High-Volume Failures “High volume” is a relative term. It depends upon what your business does and how many of a product you plan to sell. For one OEM, a minimum initial run might be 250K units. For another, 10K is the expected run of a product across its entire market life. One way to consider “high volume” is that it’s large enough to hurt your business if you make a mistake. Put another way, high volume is high risk. And given the stakes, you want to minimize this Read Article

Real-Prototyping World There’s something to be said about the difference between designing your system on an evaluation board compared to designing it using the board on which your system is actually going to ship. One of the problems with using an evaluation board is that it’s a really nice environment to work in. Too nice, in some respects. The processor company wants you to have a positive experience with their chip so the eval board has all the bells and whistles Read Article

Riding Technology Waves There’s tremendous value in being able to utilize the latest and greatest technology on the market. Of course, the leading edge is sharp and there are ways you can cut yourself if you aren’t careful. In general, though, having the flexibility to choose where you ride technology waves enables you to better balance the overall performance, cost, and power efficiency as you design systems. I remember an industrial embedded system I was optimizing Read Article

Linux and Android: What’s the Difference When purchasing an off-the-shelf module or designing a customized module of your own using a design tool like Geppetto, you have to select an operating system. Often, you have a variety of choices. Two popular open source software (OSS) platforms are Linux and Android. If you’re new to design, how do you know which one you want to use? There are complicated, highly technical answers to this question. However, if you are like many designers, you Read Article

Optimizing Power Consumption Power efficiency—energy efficiency if you’re a purist—has become perhaps the highest-profile aspect of system design. This is especially true for IoT applications where a device may need to operate for years on harvested energy or a cell battery. Thus, a critical stage of design is power optimization. Typically, the first stage of power optimization is setting the power budget. For example, the system spec might state that the device has to be Read Article

Continuous Manufacturing Volume As a manufacturing term, it can mean different things, depending upon the industry. Volume production for an automotive OEM means hundreds of thousands of units. For an industrial CNC manufacturer, lifetime sales over decades might be in the tens of thousands. For many small design companies, producing even “low” volumes may be a manufacturing challenge. It takes success to be able to invest in infrastructure that supports higher volumes Read Article