Five traps to avoid when changing from hand assembly to machine assembly

In the past, it was usually pretty easy to find chips in both surface mount and thru-hole packages. Somewhere in the last decade or so, component manufacturers stopped introducing thru-hole versions of their newest chips as standard practice. In many... Read more

Mistakes Were Made - Too Much Ground Isolation

I recently ran a batch of my Neo Pixel clock boards through the factory here. It's an Arduino UNO-based design that I made for myself not long ago. It sports an Atmega328P, with bootloader, an FT231X USB chip, and a... Read more

Out of Ideas and applied Heisenberg

Every now and then, most of us seem to run out of ideas. Then, like the proverbial high school term paper, with a subject requirement of: “Pick a subject you’re interested in”, we struggle to come up with what to... Read more

TESLA’S MENTOR: SIR WILLIAM CROOKES

Sir William Crookes was the inventor of the vacuum tube, discoverer of helium and master experimenter. He was also a very spiritual man and often experimented with the paranormal. Someone as smart of him MUST have been onto something. Nikola... Read more

A What?

I was asked to write a little something about “makers” and how they are relevant to what we do here. A what? The first step was to ask Google “What is a maker” and find out what I had just volunteered for. Read more

The Coming Robot Uprising - 10 Ways To Survive

So, dancing robots are now in the Guinness Book of Records. Not too many things can compete in the category of "dancing robots", so a world record is not all that impressive a feat. Of course, when you're talking over... Read more

Building boards for the Intel Edison

I've recently spent some time getting familiar with the Intel Edison. The Edison has a dual-core 500 MHZ Intel Atom processor, with built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It comes with 1GB of RAM, 4GB of eMMC internal storage, and a USB... Read more

Seeing Gravity Waves

Here at Screaming Circuits, we assemble PCBs for a lot of interesting organizations. Perhaps one of the most interesting is LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravity Wave Observatory). In case you've been busy with Pokemon GO for the last few months, and... Read more

Electronic Business Card Holder, Part III

If you haven't yet read part one or two of this series, find them here: part one part two With all of the key design decisions under my belt, it was time to build. I ordered the boards and parts... Read more

Electronic Business Card Holder, Part II

If you haven't yet read it, rush on back and read part one of this series... Done yet? Okay, good. When I left off, I had promised some design decisions, of which, the power source would be the first. I... Read more