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Thought Leadership
Manufacturing and Online Gerber Viewers: Manufacturing with Browser Based Design
Watching your design come together in a layout program is hugely satisfying. But when it comes to manufacturing, preparing your designs for fabrication is a different beast. If you don’t have a ton of experience in this area, compiling information that fabricators need to build your device may seem tedious and unnecessary. You might be wondering, “why can’t my manufacturer just look at my CAD files and figure it out themselves?” While they
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Free Bill of Materials Software vs. Integrated Design Software
The first time I prepared functional requirements for a web platform, I thought the document was massively complex. I forget the number of youtube tutorials I watched on preparing this document. Now that I have prepared several of these documents for a number of startups, I could probably write functional requirements in my sleep. A bill of materials might also seem like a complex document if you have never prepared one in the past. When it comes
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When Should You Use an Online Circuit Calculator?
Even if you’re an experienced engineer, you probably haven’t perfectly memorized every single formula you need to design PCBs and electronic devices. If this is true for experienced engineers, then what is a weekend warrior to do? Thankfully, there are many online calculators available that can help even novice designers build devices that meet industry standards. As you venture down the rabbit hole of designing a new electronic product, it
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Don’t Let Unmanageable Tools Deny You the Joy of Designing a PCB
There are a lot of “firsts” in our lives; the first time we drove alone after getting our driver’s license, going out on our first real date, buying our first home. These moments, and millions of others like them, are supposed to bring a feeling of joy when we remember them. Another moment of joy for me was the first PCB design that I worked on. I remember routing traces on a design that a co-worker opened up for me the first time I sat in front
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Low Power Electronics: Do You Need a Battery to Keep Your Circuit Boards Online?
I was recently chatting with a friend of mine about his new hardware startup and how his progress on his new product was coming along. He was building a Bluetooth device and his first run at a prototype only kept his circuit board online for 40 minutes before draining the battery. I’ve noticed the difficulty of many IoT devices is that often they need to run for long periods of time. Whether it’s something you can wear or a sensor in a smart home
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Online PCB Fabrication: What to Know About Small or Large PCB Printing Services
If you’re like any designer, you’ve probably spent more time than necessary trying to hammer out all the kinks of your printed circuit board before you go into making your device. But, especially if you’re not particularly part of the industry, you might wonder how exactly the “printed” gets put into the “printed circuit board”. After you’ve spent time learning the particulars of PCB design and laying out your new dream device, it’s time to bring
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The Benefits of Using a BOM Management Tool for PCB
I am perhaps the worst speller in the history of the world. I’m the guy who asks his wife to sign the guestbook because I’m terrified that I will mess up someone’s name or write an unintelligible comment. The happiest days of my life have been when spell checkers became commonplace in web browsers, E-mail, and word processors. Even with that though there have still been a few times when I’ve driven a spell checker to its knees with some word that
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Designing in an Intuitive Interface Leaves Time for Bright Ideas in Users and Experienced Designers
Keeping it simple with complex tasks demanding attention is challenging on a good day. Tools available to compute mountains of details with lightning speed is powerful but can be overwhelming if poorly designed. Powerful elegant tools move ideas into usage and benefit many. Many are benefited every day while using smartphones to communicate news, to navigate cars, and to keep scheduled calendar dates. Digital devices use printed circuit board
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Using Rules-Driven Design to Control a High-Frequency Board
There was a time where high-frequency design belonged to realm of specialized engineers who lived in a world all of their own. For those of us designing printed circuit boards we rarely ventured into this realm, and when we did we were very happy to turn over that portion of the design to those engineers. They would perform calculations based on formulas that seemed to originate from the mystic arts, and then direct us to how the circuit should
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Build Your Own PCBs With Clear Instructions From Accurate Bom Statistics Data
There is an intersection not too far from where I live that causes a lot of confusion. It’s a three-way intersection in the shape of a “T”, and yet only one branch of the “T” has a stop sign on it. I don’t know why it was built this way or why it hasn’t been corrected, but the results are often dangerous. People waiting at the stop sign who aren’t familiar with the intersection tend to assume that the other two branches have stop signs as well
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Design Layout Integration and What it Means for Your Printed Circuit Board
Not all PCB design software is created equal. Your PCB design tools can come in a variety of interfaces, software programs, and workflows, and creating some consistency among tools can be a huge productivity booster. Design tools that are separated into different programs and that enforce different workflows will seriously hamper your productivity. When everything is separated into different interfaces, translating between programs creates the
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Tips to Minimize the Effects of Differential Noise in RS485 Communication
I’ve never been a morning person and pride myself on simply getting dressed and making it to work on time. Although I typically beat the traffic and appear at the office just in time, there have been occasions when I’ve arrived wearing mismatched socks. In these situations, I walk straight to my desk and hope that my embarrassment stays unnoticed. In electronics, you might deal with a completely different type of embarrassment if you fail to keep
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How to Expand Input and Output for a Microcontrollers Circuit Board
When working through practice boards and schematics very early on in my education, I remember more than once thinking about simply increasing the board size so that I could fit my components properly and make routing easier. It definitely would not have helped, and I’m glad I persevered in finding solutions through the challenges, but there are still times in my career where I’ve looked at the necessities of devices and wished I could just make
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Altium's Bill of Materials Software: Get Rid of ORCAD's BOM and Keep It Simple With ActiveBOM
I don’t know about you, but I have no desire to be a software engineer. I want software that does routine tasks in the background, leaving me to focus on creative activities. Leaving behind rote demands moves my day into dealing with higher-level details like how electricity flows through components. That’s why I’ve ditched ORCAD Bill of Materials software and moved on to Altium’s ActiveBOM–the best Bill of Materials software. Making Bills of
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Test Out and Validate High-Speed Designs with Signal Integrity Simulation
Sometimes the biggest onion can’t be peeled. It seems simple enough. You pick up an onion, a knife, and get going. It would be nice if all of life were so simple, and I suppose it is if you can just break each task into a simple series of steps. Along with intuitive tools, each step leads to the next and pretty soon you’re sending commands from your smart phone to your food processor before you get home. Signal integrity simulators feel like a
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Using Altium's PDN Analyzer and Incorporating Simulation-Driven Workflow
If you’ve ever placed your hand near the vent on your computer, you can get a sense for the heat being created by the motherboard. Fans are designed to remove heat generated by the components on your motherboard, particularly by your CPU and GPU. The same effects occur in PCBs, even if they do not include components that consume a large amount of power. Power is consumed as it is delivered from the power source to the components, and power drops
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Optimizing Design Output Files for Large Batch Production
For as long as PCB designers have used CAD tools to design their circuit boards, they have also had to create output files from those CAD tools to get the design manufactured. This used to be a time-consuming task involving a lot of manual intervention. You would have to create several related documents in addition to the data files, and perhaps even use a different design tool to create manufacturing drawings. Anymore though, the process of
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