#Circuit Design

[depthbuffer]

DIY line-out to Eurorack-in amp explainer now up on depthbuffer.uk!

always wanted to add an electronics hobby to your mid-life crisis, but never bothered to learn?

spent so much on eurorack gear that you now can't afford an audio input module for your line out jacks?

like reading long-winded explanations, written in overly flowery prose, by passionate nerds who don't actually know what they're talking about, but want to tell you all about it anyway?

then boy, do I have a poorly-illustrated, badly researched five-article series for you!

[pcbmust]

PCB Design: The Key to Engineering Innovation

[volersystems]

Bringing an IoT device to market requires expertise in hardware, firmware, and connectivity. This is where electronics design play a crucial role in turning concepts into functional, high-performance products. At Voler Systems, we specialize in designing electronic solutions that power smart devices across industries, ensuring reliability and efficiency in every project.

[aspensmonster]

Circuit design war stories from the 20th century? Awesome :D

Bare CPU Printed Circuit Board for the Alpha NT XL366 workstation I designed back in 1995 or so. This was an obscure model of an obscure product line, made by a company (Digital Equipment Corp.) that is now itself obscure. To be honest I don't even remember much about this machine now.

What I do remember is the HUUUUGE fight I got into with our Signal Integrity team while I was designing this, over decoupling capacitors.

Decoupling caps are small components that hold a charge to help even out power when a circuit is active. This board featured hundreds of them, smaller than a grain of rice (see photo comparison of mounting pads vs rice grain below).

Our Signal Integrity team was tasked with making sure everything was electrically stable, so they required many hundreds of these to be added to the board, based on power simulations they did. Trouble was, they wanted so many, we couldn't even build the board.

My job as the Systems Engineer here was to meet the requirements from the SI team, but also from manufacturing, and the requirement that my PCB layout techs don't go insane trying to place and route the board. SI really only cared about signal quality, so they would not relent, and I ended up getting shouted at at one point by a junior SI engineer who was also under a lot of stress, when I said "There are different schools of thought on this.." and he screamed THERE ARE NOT DIFFERENT SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT ON THIS!!

It got to the point where the product was not going to get built, because we just couldn't fit like a thousand of these tiny caps on the board, we needed to ditch at least 25% of them to have a hope. The models were the models though, and you couldn't argue against them.

But then my boss got a genius idea. What if we could prove the simulation models were too conservative? We came up with an experiment where we would remove caps from an older system and measure the power supply noise, to see how many caps could be taken off before the system became unstable.

Me and the junior SI engineer were tasked with doing this experiment (later deemed The Decapitation Project), so we grabbed a Tektronix scope and Metcal soldering station and headed over to this abandoned lab we had in our old Maynard headquarters, a now creepy attic space on the 6th floor of an old mill building. Here were a few older Alphastation 3000 workstations we built years earlier, working but waiting to be recycled.

We had this special program that would thrash the CPU within an inch of its life, to put a big demand on the power supply system. While this was running, the SI engineer measured the power quality, while I proceeded to (very carefully to avoid short-circuiting the system) actually desolder caps from the board while the workstation was running.

We managed to get about 1/3 of them off before there was any noticeable effect, and we found one specific type of cap was not doing much of anything at all. We took the data back to the head of the SI team, and he finally relented and let us remove several hundred capacitors. (He also buried the report and data I had, because he didn't want the bad publicity - I remember being mad about that)

The system got built after that, and worked just fine. We did try to enact a small bit of petty revenge on the SI team manager though - there was a recognition event for people involved on the project, and me and our PCB procurement guy decided to give the SI team manager a special "Faraday Award" for achievement in capacitance (Farads are a measure of capacitance - geeky eng joke). We took an old bowling trophy with a giant, beer-can sized electrolytic capacitor strapped to the top of it as the award. He was a no-show so we didn't get to present it. Those SI guys never did have much of a sense of humor.

Anyway, long story sorry. Just thinking of it recently because I was helping someone at work with an analog simulation and I remembered this..

[learnandgrowcommunity]

VHDL Tutorial : Your First VHDL Design: VHDL Entity & Architecture - A Beginner's Guide

Welcome to the ultimate beginner's guide for Your First VHDL Design! In this video, we will dive into the fundamentals of VHDL Entity and Architecture and provide you with a comprehensive understanding of the topic. Whether you are new to VHDL or looking to refresh your knowledge, this guide is designed to help you get started and pave your way to becoming an expert VHDL designer. In this tutorial, we will cover the basics of VHDL, starting with the VHDL Entity and its crucial role in the design process. You will learn how to define and describe the inputs and outputs of your VHDL design using the Entity section, providing the necessary specifications for your project. Moving on, we will explore the VHDL Architecture, which defines the actual implementation of your design. Through a step-by-step walkthrough, you will discover how to construct the architecture block by block, ensuring a well-structured and functional VHDL design. To make the learning experience more practical, we will dive into real-world examples and demonstrate each concept using a popular VHDL software tool. You'll witness the transition from theory to practice, gaining hands-on experience in VHDL design. With this beginner's guide, you'll not only grasp the essentials of VHDL Entity and Architecture but also acquire the ability to kickstart your own VHDL designs, opening up a wide range of possibilities in digital circuit design. Subscribe to our channel for more exciting VHDL tutorials and stay tuned for upcoming videos in this series where we will explore advanced VHDL concepts and applications.

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[rollandwrite]

Jennifer Roberts gave a talk on the history of circuit printing and how it interacts with printmaking. And it is available on youtube!

[sweeneydino]

Moop.

[pngjamie]

I FUCKING WON

I WILL BE REDRAWING N PREG IN HONOR OF THIS

[arcadebroke]

DMG-01

[pcbmust]

Redefining Possibilities: Unveiling the Wonders of PCB Design

[volersystems]

Bringing an IoT device to market requires expertise in hardware, firmware, and connectivity. This is where electronics design play a crucial role in turning concepts into functional, high-performance products. At Voler Systems, we specialize in designing electronic solutions that power smart devices across industries, ensuring reliability and efficiency in every project.

[deceptive-oasis]

{{Boy, I do love all the different flavors of AM humanizations.}}

We got ✨️

-Bird™

-That's just Harlan Ellison and you're right.

-TV Head

-Abstract wire nightmare

-Traumatized Veteran

-Skeezy businessman

[zegalba]

Jean Paul Gaultier: 'Mad Max' Invitation Card autumn/winter 1995-1996

[mooncrepes]

nonhuman lesbians? in MY utau? it's more likely than you think

[tangentburd]

Here's my mobile wallpaper design for @bycmykae's Year of the Snake mobile calendar project. See how many snake-related motifs and representations you can find in it! *

I had WAY too many concepts in mind for this, including circuit boards, Chinese/Celtic knots, Valentine's Day (I was assigned the month of February) and Chinese calligraphy — the characters 春・逢 respectively mean "spring (the season)" and "meeting face-to-face / a chance encounter".

Thanks again to mod Lucy for this sssuper interesting project, and happy Year of the Snake too to all of you!

🐍 [ Download the calendar for free on itch.io ] 🐍

* hint: at least 5!

[dorkfruit]

to say toontown lives in my mind rent free would be an understatement, toontown is the landlord of the apartment complex that is my sanity. anyways heres some of my recent sketches

art meme by @purgatorei . i decided no repeats because it would just literally be ms. mingler for every single one

the new supervisor designs kinda slap tbh aka i wanted to draw the freaky smiley golf lady but decided i should do the others too

oh and then i realized its called toontown and i literally never draw the toons so i did that and then caved and drew a cog anyways im sorry for letting capitalism win