The term "via" probably comes from the Latin word meaning "road." Therefore, open via would essentially mean "open road." Open roads, here in Oregon sometimes run through open range ranch land. That means that cows have as much right to... Read more
Earlier this year we built the electronic badges for the Open Source Hardware Summit. The badge was very nice as is, but I extended it with a LiPoly battery pack of my own design. The badges were assembled in our... Read more
The name stands for "Extra Small Outline No-lead." It's a newish package from Texas Instruments. In my experience, Ti is one of the better companies where testing and documenting manufactureability is concerned. The datasheet for this device [www.ti.com/lit/an/scea055/scea055.pdf] is no... Read more
Have you purchased any electronics components lately? Have you tried and failed to do so lately? Allocation is the word of the day and substitutions are your friend. Many, many parts are in short supply, or unavailable with extraordinarily long... Read more
The QFN (quad flat pack, no leads) package can no longer be considered exotic. It was when I first wrote about it a decade ago, but not any more. In fact, with the wafer scale BGA, it's one of the... Read more
Our all-things-about-electronics manufacturing standards body, the IPC, specifies the proper numbering order for most components. That's a pretty nice thing that they do there, but it's not always enough to prevent layout mishaps. Case in point a line of small... Read more
A few days ago, I wrote about HASL PC board surfaces, explaining that it's not an appropriate choice for small parts. Look at the same PCB image as I used yesterday. You might not recognize it because yesterday, it was... Read more
Part numbers are incredibly important, but can also be incredibly annoying and confusing. Obviously, we all need them, but it would be nice if there were some semblance of a standard. Well, there are some standards, like capacitor grades and... Read more
Am I a broken record? Pretty much - especially when it comes to confusing diode marketing. For example, everyone knows what the diode symbol looks like, and pretty much everyone knows which side is the anode and which is the... Read more
One of the handy aspects of getting boards assembled at Screaming Circuits is that we don't require fiducial marks for standard process boards. I would say that we build far more boards without fiducials than with. That's cool, but there... Read more
