Right now you can get a custom circuit board delivered to your door in about a week for just a few dollars. There’s little reason to make your own circuit boards at home anymore, but when you need a board now, you want to have that capability. [tuval] designed a complete PCB etching station that […]
When designing a printed circuit board, there are certain rules. You should place decoupling capacitors near the power pins to each chip. Your ground planes should be one gigantic fill of copper; two ground planes connected by a single trace is better known as an antenna. Analog sections should be kept separate from digital sections, […]
Join us Wednesday at 5:00 PM Pacific time for the Easy EDA Hack Chat with Dillon He! Note the different time than our usual Hack Chat slot! Dillon will be joining us from China. Since the birth of electronic design automation in the 1980s, the universe of products to choose from has grown tremendously. Features […]
If you play with high speed design for long enough, eventually you’re going to run into clock skew and other weird effects. [Robert Feranec] recently ran into this problem and found an interesting solution to visualizing electric fields in a PCB. A word of warning before we dig into this, for most of the projects […]
Join us Thursday at noon Pacific time for the OSH Park Hack Chat with Drew and Chris!Note the different day from our usual Hack Chat schedule! Printed circuit boards have been around for decades, and mass production of them has been an incalculable boon to the electronics industry. But turning the economics of PCB production […]
A factory is a machine. It takes a fixed set of inputs – circuit boards, plastic enclosures, optimism – and produces a fixed set of outputs in the form of assembled products. Sometimes it is comprised of real machines (see any recent video of a Tesla assembly line) but more often it’s a mixture of […]
Here at Hackaday, we thought we’d seen every method of making PCBs: CNC machining, masking and etching with a variety of chemicals, laser engraving, or even the crude but effective method of scratching away the copper with a utility knife. Whatever works is fine with us, really, but there still does seem to be room […]
Over on hackaday.io and deep in the Hackaday Prize, a lot of cool people are playing around with the possibilities of putting coils in printed circuit boards. On the face of it, it makes sense: drawing spirals on a PCB gets you an electromagnet. This allows you to do all sorts of crazy things. You […]
While at the Hacker Hotel camp in the Netherlands back in February, our attention was diverted to an unusual project. [Niklas Fauth] had bought along a Tesla coil, but it was no ordinary Tesla coil. Instead of the usual tall coil and doughnut-shaped capacity hat it took the form of a stack of PCBs with […]
Join us Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the KiCad and FreeCAD Hack Chat led by Anool Mahidharia! The inaugural KiCon conference is kicking off this Friday in Chicago, and KiCad aficionados from all over the world are gathering to discuss anything and everything about the cross-platform, open-source electronic design automation platform. As you’d expect, […]