Buried Pad PCB Fixing
Back in 2021, SparkFun's founder Nathan Seidle shared with us details about his company's “Wall of Unabashed Failure,” which is basically it is a wall full of bad PCBs. As he explains, each PCB failure tells a different story and serves as a reminder, so no one makes the same mistakes again. In this article, Seidle talks about PCB design, problem solving, and “a maneuver that I haven’t seen or tried before.” The best engineers know how to learn from their mistakes.
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Low-Volume Board Production: With and without Assembly
You've successfully designed and tested an electronic circuit board, and you're eager to produce it in small quantities. Yet, if you lack the financial capacity to order 10,000 pre-assembled boards and store them for future use, what alternatives are available to you? Saad Imtiaz (Senior Engineer, Elektor) offers some valuable suggestions. In addition to comparing a few notable PCB services, he covers component sourcing, touches on PCBA pooling, and offers tips for better PCB design
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PCB Tips and Tricks
PCB and PCB design technology is always improving. But it still helps to learn about tips, tricks, and solutions from the past. In this article, long-time Elektor Burkhad Kainka shares some insights about producing your own PCBs. He covers helpful topics such as building a proto-PCB, wiring diagrams, PCB layout, ground planes, connectors, checking board layout, and more. As you’ll see, many of his strategies are particularly useful when designing simple circuit boards for experimental projects.
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My First PCB: Going Headfirst Into KiCad
With open-source ECAD software, you can develop a workflow for creating printed circuit boards (PCB). George Lydecker became interested in KiCad because it is free and there are numerous online articles and videos about it. In this article, he touches on creating a schematic, creating a PCB layout, 3-D KiCad renderings, manufacturing a test run, testing a board, and more.
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