EE-Training

Knowledge makes you Curious

Schmartboard breakout prototyping PCB

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The hunt for the perfect prototyping breakout boards ended at “Schmartboard” this time. At my first job, we had something we called “mini-mount” in the lab. Lots of them. And we used it to build all kinds of prototypes. Basically, it was a footprint for some SMT part on a thin single layer PCB with… Read more

AVL: Approved Vendor List 2.0

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Is the approved vendor list a good idea? If you have ever been involved in electronic development for anything manufactured in volumes, you know how important second sourcing is. For as many parts of the system as possible, you want to have multiple independent suppliers. That just makes procurement so much easier when the thing… Read more

Nicest Eval Board Ever: The Crazyflie

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The nicest eval board out there? This got to be the Crazyflie.  This “evaluation board” (that’s what you call it when you ask your boss if you can order it) is showing off what you can do with a Nordic Semiconductor 2.4GHz chip. And yes: It was developed in Sweden 🙂 so quite suitable as… Read more

Minimum Footprint Debug Connector

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This is a great little product solving a number of problems – smallest or minimum footprint debug connector. The board space required for debug/programming connectors is sometimes not really there. Or the height. Or the cost of maintaining two variants of the BOM with and without the connector. Tag-Connect fixes all this. Put a super… Read more

Cheap Cool Logic Analyzer

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The days of logic analyzers are not quite over yet. But due to signaling speeds going up, LA’s tend to be used a lot less these days. The issues are a combination of physical probing and speed. Traditional LA clip-on probes have very few places to attach on a modern high speed board with BGA’s… Read more

Cheap RLC Smart Tweezers on eBay

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I just found some neat and quite cheap RLC smart tweezers on eBay. Having an RLC meter is really useful in many situations. For measuring the capacitance of all capacitors on a PCB at once or just an individual capacitor. Just to mention a few uses. Maybe you were aware, but I was surprised to… Read more