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Reusing PCB Design Elements
Tuesday, December 13, 2022 in Blog
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Board template layout Here’s the scenario: you’ve come up with a great product design, designed the electronics, written the software, set up testing, designed an enclosure, set up manufacturing, and are shipping products. Version 0.1.0 …
Building an Automated Test Jig: Hardware
Sunday, November 27, 2022 in Blog
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Merifix MF300 Fixture Part 2. of figuring out how to build a series of automated testing jigs for Hobbs ElectroOptics and ElectroOptical Innovations. The first part “Requirements and Resources” is available here. Like the first part this …
Building an Automated Test Jig: Requirements & References
Thursday, November 24, 2022 in Blog
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Summary Here’s a list of design goals to guide the design of a series of related production test system. A list of interesting resources and and companies is included. Introduction Blue Clover Tester Chassis As the number of projects …
kicad-parts-placer
Saturday, November 19, 2022 in Blog
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New Tool: kicad-parts-placer Manually positioning critical components for a design such as pogo pins for test fixtures can be tedious and error-prone. kicad-parts-placer simplifies this process by automating exact batch placement of parts in KiCad …
Timing Diagrams
Wednesday, November 09, 2022 in Blog
(Updated: )ADC Timing I have recently been working as part of a team generating some custom silicon for a high speed time of flight LIDAR. The digital logic is very simple but its important to get this correct. The team has several different groups all working …
Tool: object-symbols-parser
Wednesday, October 26, 2022 in Blog
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Intro Link: https://github.com/snhobbs/object_symbols_parser When the linker can’t complete as the image size is overrunning the section sizes defined in your linker script, it can be a pain to get the symbol table to find out what is causing …
Sigrok + $10 Logic Analyzer
Thursday, October 13, 2022 in Blog
Sometimes, the simplest tools can save hours of frustration. When I found myself on the road, away from the lab, struggling to debug I2C and SPI issues, I turned to a surprisingly capable $10 fx2 logic analyzer, powered by Sigrok. Logic analyzer …
KiCad PCBNew Scripting: Basic scripting beyond the built in terminal
Monday, June 13, 2022 in Blog
The internal WX based scripting terminal in KiCad’s PCBNew is as bare bones as it gets. You can use a normal interface with the LoadBoard function in the pcbnew scripting interface. There isn’t any documentation to speak of for the API …
KiCad PCBNew Scripting: Removing Ref Des From Silk Screen
Saturday, June 11, 2022 in Blog
(Updated: )Purpose Most boards I design include reference designators on the silkscreen. This way, during bring-up, I can rely solely on the schematic, BOM, and board—no need to cross-reference with CAD. When doing a tight design it may not be possible to fit …
Text Formatting In the Terminal
Thursday, February 10, 2022 in Blog
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Rich Table I wanted to share a useful python library that I finally remembered to use after staring it while browsing Github awhile ago. Finding a new useful library can be incredibly invigorating, sometimes it’s a waste of time, but the other …