Weekend Wisdom - Living With our Supply Chain

Unless you've been sequestered in your home for the last few years, you've been bombarded with messages about the broken supply chain. Everything is in short supply, it's a crisis, it's unprecedented, and I just don't know what to do... Read more

Weekend Wisdom and The Remote Work Debate

Like many of us, I've been following the "return to the office" or "remain remote" debate. My place of work has settled into a hybrid situation. People physically running our machines have to be here because those machines require a... Read more

Via in pad refresher

It's a good time for a via-in-pad refresher. It's not quite as hot a topic as it has been in the past, but it's still a very important consideration. It's always a bit controversial. The assembly process folks pretty much... Read more

On-demand PCB Assembly and Electronics manufacturing

What is on-demand manufacturing, and why is it so important these days? Well, to begin, on-demand manufacturing is about allowing you to work and prioritize based on your schedule, not ours, and to allow you to get a quote and... Read more

A Few Details of Note about Solder Mask

I'm going to oversimplify this, so my apologies to our colleagues over at Sunstone Circuits, but a PC board basically has four parts: metal, substrate, solder mask and silk screen. I might simplify it even more to say that it... Read more

Weekend Wisdom and Your Workspace

Weekend Wisdom and Your Workspace, or: What do you have on your desk? I was involved in an interesting discussion the other day about workspace cleanliness. It seems there are about three main camps (and a million smaller ones): Folks... Read more

Good kit - bad kit for kitted assembly jobs

Well over half of the projects we build here come in as turn-key orders, meaning we buy some or all of the parts and PC boards for the job. However, plenty of folks still do kit up their parts and... Read more

Weekend Wisdom - Prognostication Review

Ever have one of those: "oh, if I only knew..." moments? I just did. I read one of my predicting-the-future blog posts from December 2018. Let me quote the first paragraph: "It's now the eve of 2019 and about all... Read more

Caution from the parts drawer

My recent post, "Law of Conservation of Parts" spoke to the value held in the old parts drawer. However, there are a few cautions that need to go along with that encouragement. Some parts do have a shelf life (batteries... Read more

Weekend Wisdom - The next big thing

In the 1970s and '80s, digital electronics was exploding just below the surface of public awareness. Early adopters were starting to use it, mainstream media was starting to report on it (usually with little understanding of what they were writing... Read more