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
The PCB fabrication and assembly industry does have standards, but enough people don’t follow these standards that sometimes the manufacturers are obliged to assume that no one does. Of all the aspects of printed circuit board (PCB) design, polarity seems... Read more
Sometimes the standards-steering-you-wrong aren't just in house, but come from Industry. Case in point the three-terminal linear regulator. Back when TO-220 packaged semiconductors were first hand chipped out of boiling lava, the LM7805 three-terminal voltage regulator established an informal standard... Read more
(https://xkcd.com/927) Some schematics get a single designer, start to finish, some get put together by a team working simultaneously, and some get handed from one designer to another mid-stream. Consistency and discipline are always important in the design process, but... Read more
You're in the middle of designing a very small wireless data collection. The size has made it a real challenge and you've always thought that you could get another important chip or two on the board if it could just... Read more
Until fairly recently the use of flexible PC board material (flex) was considered only for specialized or exotic applications. As tends to happen with advanced technology, the "mainstream" has caught wind of flex. With so many Internet of Things (IoT)... Read more
Should folks building small numbers of circuit boards use surface-mount parts, or should they stick with through-hole components that are so much easier to handle and solder (not to mention see)? I spend my days and nights surrounded by printed... Read more
Yes. As a matter of fact, you can. This example - our "You Do You" motion activated lapel pin for the 2020 Open Source Hardware summit in New York City, March 13 says that you can. You can find all... Read more
In designing my YouDoYou lapel pin for the upcoming Open Source Hardware Summit (March 13, 2020 in New York city), I had a couple of firsts. This was my first design using a lot of 0201 passives and this was... Read more
Some parts just look cooler than others. I really like the super tiny WLCSP (wafer level chip scale package) BGAs that some newer ARM microcontroller and power components come in. They not only fit the "smaller is cooler" mantra, but... Read more
