30-second Philosophy - Wait or Rev Part 2

When you sell a house, the offer they make sounds great until you realize that the big number gets a lot smaller after accounting for replacing the roof, digging out the 60-year-old heating oil tank and fixing the 80-year-old plumbing.... Read more

Fundamentals of Marketing - Marketing for the Engineer Entrepreneur

The language of the engineer and the marketeer don't always mix well. It's understandable. The two disciplines have different vocabulary sets and different objectives. To make matters worse, there is a lot of bad marketing floating out and about. Some... Read more

Quoting PCB Assembly got you down?

In five years, plenty of new chip fabs will be online and we'll be able to buy those microcontrollers again. Of course, the brand new AugInt drive chips will still be hard to come by, but what breakthrough new technology... Read more

Supply Chain Woes - An open letter to microcontroller companies

To all of you out there who design, manufacture and sell microcontrollers - I'm talking to you! Actually, I'm talking to anyone who makes chips that have programmable configuration bits and overlapping model numbers. What do I mean by "overlapping... Read more

Parts Quoting - Features to Help

Our components supply chain is a mess. That's just the world we live in, but it doesn't mean any of us should stop designing and building cool and useful things. We're doing our best to find ways to make quoting... Read more

The right tool for the job

I once ordered a set of surface mount resisters and instead received a bag of 5.5mm barrel jacks. Funny thing is, the label and part number on the bag were correct for the SMT part. The part that I received... Read more

Broken Supply Chain: Good or Bad?

Some time ago, I read that it takes about 30 years for a new society-changing technology to explode into mainstream use after it’s shown to become commercially viable. My addition to that bit of wisdom is that for the first... Read more

30-Second Philosophy - Wait or Rev

Ever have your brain interpret what you are writing as something completely different from your intent - as you are writing it? Or is that just me? Clearly, the title of this post is meant to describe this post as... Read more

Why are we here, revisited

In December, 2018, I wrote the first "Why are we here?" post in this series. December, 2018 was about one year before we, in the electronics manufacturing business, started hearing about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on distant suppliers.... Read more

LED Polarity - Still

Some things never cease to astound me. A lot can go wrong in a product design cycle. Creating a good layout from a complex schematic is a difficult enough job as is, but when component marking logic leaves the building,... Read more