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- WotW
- Shoutouts
- Rants
- DigiKey and Electronic Design Magazine have a new show!
- We don’t want to register for new shows or for engineering calculator apps for phones.
- The people who claim to have an idea that will “make millions” but want you to build it for them…because they can’t.
- Follow-Up
- Intel 14nm fab going to be made possible with new EUV tools.
- Discussion Points
- Intel wants to charge to upgrade the performance of your existing CPU.
- Europe wants the chip fabs to come back. Apparently, they just figured out that manufacturing is important.
- Why are 9V batteries still common in cheapo DMMs?
As a reminder for those interested, the 555 Contest ends tomorrow, March 1st at 11:59 pm EST! Get your entries in now!
You should definitely do a car analogy.
The cheap, but IMHO nice, board shop Dave talked about is ITead studio:
http://iteadstudio.com/store/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=19_20
I have a 600 DPI scan of a 10×10 cm board from ITead:
http://www.hackaarhus.dk/forum/download/file.php?id=47
The service from ITead is really good, they actually do answer email and respond.
Another order had some un-etched areas leading to shorts, so if you want to be certain you can use all the pcbs, then go for 100% electronic testing, which is a bit extra.
The registration of layers to holes can be imperfect, so I leave an annular ring of at least 0.25 mm (10 mil), which has so far been enough to avoid any problems.
The smallest vias I use are 0.8mm with 0.3mm holes, and that seems to work reliably.
They do routing to edge, so you get really nice, smooth edges and you can do funky shapes as well.
I have not found a way to get un-plated holes, but getting the extraneous plating in mounting holes doesn’t bother me.
If you are doing an Open Source Hardware design with all the sources available, then you can get a couple of free PCBs, and ITead will sell the rest of the boards in their shop, I can’t find the information on this deal right now, but someone more thrifty might.
For anyone that missed it, I just discovered that you -CAN- listen to the recorded Electronic Design (edited by Chris) from yesterday. You still have to register, and you can not, as far as I can tell, download it. If you go to the original event page [ http://bit.ly/dKw3go ] and register you go through the same steps as when it was live, but it plays back the recording in all it’s awful audio glory.
Bob Pease also hosts the National Semiconductor “Analog By Design Show”
http://www.national.com/analog/nationaltv
I also remembered that series, but unfortunately the download links seem not to work. I found the following youtube channel with the videos online:
http://www.youtube.com/user/andyaronsonnsc
You can use : jetable.org for a temp email and don’t give your real email to register-crap.
Just to clarify some of the comments made about our radio show this past Monday. The webinar format is effect only for the first two shows. Then we’ll have a radio player on our site to download the shows, both new and archived. The shows will also be available on iTunes.
The purpose of the webinar format and registration is to build an audience base who we can alert about new shows and their content.
Regarding the sound quality, we didn’t get any other complaints, but were limited by the quality available by calling into the webcast provider (ON24).
My reference to the first ever Electronic Design radio show was to our brand not to the electronic design in general (see electronicdesign.com).
Thanks for commenting Joe! Sorry about the Design News/Electronic Design mix up!
It’s good to hear that you guys are moving away from the Webinar format in the future. I think people are used to and want a downloadable format. The iTunes will help with subscriptions and hopefully there will be a feed as well. Hopefully with the new format and a new provider will allow higher fidelity recordings.
We’re looking forward to future shows!
One last thing, we are Electronic Design, not Design News.
Hey guys, just a head’s up on the brand – We’re Electronic Design not Design News. We’re Penton, we also do EngineeringTV.com, Power Electronics Technology, MicroWaves & RF, Mobile Dev and Design. Thanks for the feedback on the sound, we’re open to any suggestions. You’re doing a great job…
Eep! Sorry about that Bill!
Hi Joe and Bill,
I think the brand name mix up was mine. I’m sorry about that.
It’s very cool to see you guys in here, and I’m sure I’m not the only one looking forward to your future programs.
A suggestion, and to reinforce what Chris said above, a program being streamed ‘live’ is irrelevant to me and most folks I know. Having an RSS feed (to allow subscribing) is essential.
At any rate, congrats on the launch of your new show!
Tune back in to the March 14th show! We will have a whole new format (read: available on-demand and for download sans registration). I will check into the RSS feed aspect, JohnS_AZ. Keep your eyes (ears?) peeled for the new format on 3/14 at http://www.electronicdesign.com. Thanks, guys…. Love the show!
Hi,
Reducing the component count to lower the cost is “muntzing”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muntzing
I really like the AH content. I like the electronics-culture talk. I recognise myself in quite a lot of subjects you guys talk about. I’d say keep it up. Talking about circuits wouldn’t work. For circuit-talk, there are a whole bunch of internet forums, where you can post pictures and whatever.
I have encountered some of the those excited people ideas that they think are valuable. I wholeheartedly agree that product ideas alone are worthless. Those people shouldn’t give up, though. They should find some way to do test their idea cheaply, say by building their idea using expensive off-the-shelf parts, just to gauge how much interest there is. I don’t want to provide them free design services, but I don’t want to discourage them or shoot them down. The vast majority of them are completely nuts, so this is probably a moot point. Someone who wanted a custom random number generator said, “if you’re not interested in the equity, do it for the benefit my invention will bring to all humankind.” I completely understand why it’s hard to be positive and supportive all the time.
About the website move: Do as Google says in the web master guide and your Google-karma will be preserved:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=93633
In short make sure that the old urls do a 301 redirect to the new urls.
About the ITead boards, I have a highres scan (600 dpi) of a couple of boards here:
http://www.hackaarhus.dk/forum/download/file.php?id=22
http://www.hackaarhus.dk/forum/download/file.php?id=47
There are two marks on the edges of the tested boards, so use those first, you might not ever get to the last 5 boards.
I also had a short on 2 out of 50 boards from another batch, so the 100% electronic testing service is a good idea if you want to use all the boards.
About the mechanical tolerance of the ITead boards, I have just measured the offset between the copper and the hole on the worst board I have and it’s between 2 and 3 pixels on the 600 DPI scan, which means that the error is between 0.08 and 0.127 mm.
The spec page actually spells this error out:
Registration (Mechanical) 0.09mm
If the hole is off by 0.09 mm and you still want the 0.15 mm minimum copper width on the thinnest side of that hole, then you need the hole to be at least 0.49 mm bigger than the hole you put in it.
The smallest vias I use are 0.3 mm holes (the smallest done by ITead) in 0.8 mm pads, which just satisfies this rule and I have not seen any of the vias fail or look too marginal.