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Thought Leadership
DC Power Supply Protection from Unexpected Damage and Inconvenience
When it comes to parenting, I might not be the best role model. This isn’t because I don’t take good care of my only son; it’s because I’m the stereotypical overprotective dad. I fuss over tiny bruises and rush for a digital thermometer at the slightest hint of a fever. Unable to stop worrying about how my son will adapt and get along with other preschoolers, I even become an occasional nuisance at his nursery. Over time, I’m starting to realize
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Collaborative Design Software: Create PCB Schematic Symbols for any Component
We’ve all been knee deep in a schematic capture session when we are suddenly hard-walled by a missing component in our project library. You check other libraries to see if the part exists but find everything except success. What do you do? Thankfully, these situations are mitigated by Altium Designer’s software solutions. With tools designed for you to work as intuitively and efficiently as you can, you will be cruising in no time. Creating your
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How to Use Altium Designer for Quick PCB Component Placement
“A place for everything, everything in its place” are profound words by the incomparable Benjamin Franklin that are especially applicable when applied to component placement on PCBs and in your Altium library loader. Let’s see how to use Altium Designer to put these words into action for your PCB design Placing Components Directly with no Schematic Whether you are creating a relatively simple printed circuit board or adding to an existing design
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Using Platform Unification Removes Need for BOM Analysis
One of my friends laments that her husband has three versions of the same flat-head screwdriver. He doesn’t put his tools away so when he goes looking for a flat-head screwdriver, he can’t find one let alone three. Rather than spend his day looking for the lost tool, he conveniently drives to the hardware store and buys another. Enterprise databases are prone to the same redundancies, that’s why BOM analysis is important. Over time, designers
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How to Interface an LED With an 8051 Microcontroller: Processes and Applications
When my professors saw my first electronics project, they weren’t too hopeful about my future as a design engineer. With hundreds of jumper wires clumsily soldered onto a prototyping board, my feeble attempt at making a ham radio barely passed as a joke. I was learning about the dot matrix, pic microcontroller, and RGB LED lights. Everyone has to start from the beginning! Thankfully, I’ve come a long way since those days. If you’re starting your
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Power Consumption Tips: What are Ways to Reduce Power Consumption in an Embedded System?
For years, I always forgot to turn off the lights and fans at my house. Despite initially denying that constantly using these appliances significantly increased my electricity usage, I eventually broke my bad habit and began turning off every little switch. After all, being more prudent about my electricity usage reduces my monthly bills and promotes a greener earth. Unfortunately, minimizing system power consumption in an embedded system
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Rigid PCB Vs Flexible PCB: How Adaptable is Your Design Approach
After working on multiple projects for a demanding client, I often relieve my stress by kicking it out at a local martial arts gym. When I was a teenager, I was quite flexible and had no trouble landing kicks. These days, however, my kicks are somewhat restrained by my rigid legs; I’m simply not as flexible as I used to be. Of course, flexibility and rigidity are important concepts outside of the martial arts gym as well. While designing PCBs
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Beyond Unified Workflow: True Unified PCB Design
When it’s crunch time my only focus is on getting my PCB design to the finish line correctly and out the door to manufacturing - unified workflow comes later. I know from experience that there are a number of obstacles in that can get in my way and cause a delay. You know, unavailable parts, feature creepage - I’m used these obstacles, they are part of the job. But I am routinely stressed by needing to manipulate different design tools and data
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3D PCB Editor Simplifies Concurrent ECAD/MCAD Modeling
Spending my weekends contending with powerful, yet non-intuitive modeling software is getting old. It is a shame we’ve come so far from the first CPU and its promise of computing power to still struggle with endless menus, and setting intricate parameters just to get started. The learning curves continue to suck precious hours from engineers and PCB designers, leaving many to give up new functions, such as 3D, in favor of reliable 2D environments
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How to Connect Two PCB Boards With a Bus: Do Not Pass When Flashing Yellow
During my school days, my favorite time of the day was when the bell rang and we were free to go home. While waiting for my school bus, I spent time messing around with my friends and would be so engrossed in playing that I’d occasionally miss my bus. Naturally, my mom wasn’t too thrilled about having to pick me up after a busy day of work. Missing the school bus, fun as it may have initially seemed, resulted in some serious grounding. Without
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Picking the Right Bluetooth Antenna Types for Your PCB Design
Have you ever tried tracing your wireless usage? Bluetooth PCB antenna design has gotten our bluetooth electronics everywhere by allowing devices to connect to a standardized matching network. For instance, I am streaming music from my phone to wireless headphones. Later, I’ll hop into my car and take phone calls through my hands-free computer system. Then I can get home and talk to my home-assistants to tell me the weather, set dinner timers
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Suppress Noise and EMI in Your PCB With the Right Analog Filter Design
The electronics industry continues to pack more capabilities onto smaller PCBs and devices are being run at lower power and at higher frequencies. Noise suppression becomes even more important as operating frequencies rise and signal levels fall, this becomes more manageable with an EMI filter for noise on a PCB design. Adding filtration to your PCB designs can enhance signal integrity in EMI-prone environments with large stray magnetic fields
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Designing to Meet a Target BOM Price and PCB Cost Estimate
Creating an accurate PCB cost estimate for design, components, production, assembly, shipping, and even firmware can be a challenging task for new designers. Even established organizations can have trouble getting it right as it's hard to anticipate every problem that can arise during a design. Manufacturers can help you handle the production and assembly portion of a project, but any time a new design needs to be put into production, components
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Avoid Signal Integrity Loss While Using a Fanout Strategy in Your PCB
When I was much, much younger, I looked at the pin layout on the back of a processor and wondered how anyone can possibly route all of those electrical connections on a PCB. I didn’t know much about signal integrity, of fanouts on PCBs then but fast forward fifteen years and now I get to layout those traces on PCBs. Fanout is a technique where short traces and vias are used to connect inner rows of pins on high pin-count ICs. Fanout can also
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Coatings vs Resins for Your PCB: What’s Best for Providing Protection?
In today’s world, protection is always a welcome asset. Whether it be protection from the rain above your head (mitigated by a roof), protection from the sun (mitigated by sunscreen), or protection from electromagnetic currents (mitigated by current isolation techniques amongst others). With resin and conformal coating for your PCB, you can think about the forces that attack your PCB from a physical (environmental) standpoint - beyond EMI
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Learning the PCB Design Software Shortcuts to Hack Your Design Growth
Even simple PCB designs can require the use of many functions and tools, and this doesn’t change if you’ve been a designer for 20-minutes or 20-years. One feature that will always make your PCB design software more efficient is using keyboard shortcuts. So how can you improve your efficiency beyond where it's at now? With a little help from Altium Designer and the shortcuts they’ve so graciously added to the program! No matter how quick your
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Routers in PCB Boards: Working with Altium Designer’s Multilayered Via Routing Rules
Some of the first ideas and drawings of two-layered PCB design came at the turn of the century, right before the world would descend into its first world war. It should come as a surprise that an idea and an adaptation to circuit boards, two-layers, developed over one-hundred years ago is still alive and well. But it should come as no surprise that with time comes new adaptations, and the era of multilayered stackups is much more appropriate for
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