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
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
As is tradition, I’ve put together my thoughts on what we have to look forward to in the new year. Uncertainty abounds and I know we all are looking for answers. That’s fine, but when I sat down to write... 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
Fun with LEDs, from the Screaming Makers LEDs are one of our favorite subjects here in the Screaming Circuits blog. Between inconsistent marking and... Well, it's mostly about inconsistent marking. In fact (or maybe in opinion), LEDs are one of... Read more
Engineers and designers are sometimes so quick to get their designs started and completed that they often overlook the obvious, who is going to build our boards? Every fabricator has different materials in stock, and different processes they employ. Work... Read more
The first answer to that question is probably going to be along the lines of: "put them on the board." But, sometimes you can't have reference designators on your board. Maybe it's too densely populated and there isn't room. Maybe,... Read more
Manufacturing, especially small volume one-time-only builds (like a prototype) is hard. It's not wise for most people to actively seek out chaos, but that's what we do, and we do it wisely. That's what we've been doing since 2003. We... Read more
There are many reasons you shouldn’t use via in pad. It’s not good practice, and those via holes act like little capillary straws and suck solder off of the pad or the BGA. That said there are some applications that... Read more
