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Circuit Break - A MacroFab Podcast episodes
- MEP EP#284: Real Engineering for a Real Engineer
MEP EP#284: Real Engineering for a Real Engineer
- When to Schedule Python for Engineers Intro Stream?
- This Saturday July 10 at 6PM central
- Twitch URL for the stream
- Overview of the Topics
- Setting up a python environment on Windows PC
- Python script talking to an embedded device over serial communication
- Not a how to write python/code stream
- Might get into Tkinter for GUI stuff
- Embedded Device will be Arduino
- SCPI to handle the coms
- List of items
- Arduino
- Windows PC
- PyCharm
- PinoTaur Production Update
- Production is going well, boards are slated to be completed soon
- The Future of the Supply Chain
- Finding part alts that work for you
- Finding different temperature ranges, packages, and even packaging
- Adventures in Plastic Injection Molding
- We have reached 1 Mega presses
- First analysis - Images below
- All “failures” were due to test bed
- Could probably go more than 1 million presses
- Will repeat 3 or 4 more times
- New batch of actuators due any day now
- Finally Real Engineering
- Ran into my very first honest to god Differential Equation…
- Got around it with excel
- To all college students - Do well but….
- What is the most computational intensive work you have had to do on the job?
52 min - MEP EP#283: You Adapt. You Overcome. You Put in a Pull Request.
MEP EP#283: You Adapt. You Overcome. You Put in a Pull Request.
- Custom DIY Multimeter?
- Fun article about meter design
- Specs
- DC Voltage
- Range 1000V
- Accuracy
- Resolution
- Autorange?
- AC Voltage
- True RMS?
- DC/AC Current?
- Range 10A
- Resistance measurement
- 4 wire kelvin
- Communication
- USB
- 2x 16 Character Display for Status
- Powering the meter
- Isolated DC-DC converter
- Enclosure
- 19” rack 1U
- Isolated mounting holes
- Safety
- HY3131
- Digilent has an arduino shield based on this Chip
- When to schedule python for engineers intro stream?
- Slack channel for poll and discussion
1 hr 4 min - MEP EP#282: When Print(); Just Works
MEP EP#282: When Print(); Just Works
- SMT Connector Considerations
- Switching from Though Hole connectors to Surface Mount connectors
- Price difference
- How many insertions?
- Via Stitching pads
- Plastic actuator update
- 420,000 presses and going strong
- 300 PPM
- Damn arduino Serial.println()
- Do Not Use Print For Debugging In Python Anymore
- Automatic verbose print statements for python!
- Easy disable
- Bipolar load switch with multiple enables
- Would rather not do this in discrete but probably going to have to
- +/-12V in with a time delay
- on switching in the load
- Second time delay that enables regulators after
- Preferably one control signal (capacitors charging)
- Considering SSR solution
- Tasty Chips segment
- Keystone 9081
- Plastic standoffs that have double sided sticky foam
- Keystone 7693
- Screw Terminal PTH 6-32 Thread
- Banana Jack Install Tool?
- No one makes a socket driven one? ¼” drive?
- Question for the future.
- What would it take to design your own Multimeter?
1 hr 1 min - MEP EP#281: Through Hole Manufacturing
MEP EP#281: Through Hole Manufacturing
Through Hole Manufacturing
- Processes
- Hand Soldering
- Soldering “robot”
- Wave soldering
- Design Criteria
- Pallets
- Selective soldering
- Design Criteria
- Keepouts
- Lead Forming
- Pre purchase?
- Forming with a die?
- Using hand tools?
- PCB design
- Holes
- Non circular?
- Annular rings
- IPC stuff
- IPC-2221 Generic Standard on Printed Board Design
- IPC-2222 Sectional Design Standard for Rigid Organic Printed Boards
- IPC-2223 Sectional Design Standard for Flexible/Rigid-Flexible Printed Boards
- IPC-7351 Generic Requirements for Surface Mount Design and Land Pattern Standard
- Performance Classification (1,2,3)
- Producibility Levels (A,B,C)
- Land Pattern Determination (Density level A,B,C)
59 min - MEP EP#280: Don't Worry About It
MEP EP#280: Don't Worry About It
- Adventures in plastic injection molding
- Beating the bubble
- Finding a new method of shooting the material to adjust for issues
- Change ejector pin depth
- Change material
- Light bleed
- Texturing
- Right to Repair is going global
- NPR business
- National Farmers Union
- Nebraska Legislature Bill 543
- Getting a pro right to repair guest on the podcast?
- Louis Rossmann update
- Uncle's Brewery Update
- Setup the boxes
- Boiled water and got all the hoses cut
- Next Steps
- Mock brew day with lye
- Brew a batch!
- PCBs for 30W Power Amp
- Stephen opens up fresh PCBs for his recent power amplifier project
- Resin Printer Update
- Liqcreate Strong-X Resin
- Strength is amazing
- Post processing is a bit more involved
- Going to try “chroming” next
- Electroless Copper
- Caswell kit
- This is the process PCB manufacturers use to plate the inside of PCB vias
- Copper plating
- Thicken up the thin electroless copper layer
- Nickel plating
- For corrosion resistance and strengthen the plating
- Copy Chrome
1 hr 3 min - MEP EP#279: Avoiding The HR Pit of Doom, Resume and Interview Tricks for Engineers
MEP EP#279: Avoiding The HR Pit of Doom, Resume and Interview Tricks for Engineers
- Engineering Resumes
- The main goal: To start a conversation
- The resume is intended to give a snapshot of you not to be your autobiography
- The person doing the interview probably has other tasks that they have to accomplish
- Your interview is important but it is likely not their main focus, keep this in mind
- Too much information is a bad thing - remember people hiring have to read lots of resumes
- The 1 page rule
- The HR pit of doom
- There is a high likelihood that your resume will not go to an engineer when you apply via any portal/service/online app
- Grammar/spelling/design/layout
- You may be the best engineer out there but if you can’t get that across to a non-engineer then you are in trouble
- Humble Bragging
- You are not Engineering Jesus
- Use tangible wording and describe cornerstones of your career
- Example - I did X task and productivity increased Y%
- Do not obfuscate your work with unclear words.
- Be clear about your involvement in your tasks
- Avoid the following
- “Responsibilities included”
- Collaborated
- Think outside the box
- Go-to person
- Value add
- Team player
- Use Verbs to describe your work
- Improved
- Managed
- Created
- Designed
- Do not Pad your resume
- Shorter and clearer are much better than essays
- Remember the HR pit and the person reading your resume
- Control the white space on your page - This can be more powerful than writing a ton of fluff
- Get to the point
- Be proud and confident in what you have done and highlight it concisely
- Use Technical Writing
- Graduate resumes
- Probably does not include much other than your schoolwork
- Absolutely put anything other than school
- Internships should be front and center
- Anything that shows your passion for your degree
- If you don’t have anything like this get on it
- Describe how you used your degree to do something
- Only put classwork that is relevant to the job you are interviewing for
- Remember - everyone in your degree had to do the same thing, it doesn’t make you special
- Objective statement - I can take it or leave it
- Dont just put - looking for a job
- See if you can make it interesting to read
- Better to write a cover letter if you have something to say in an Objective Statement
- How to describe things you can’t describe in detail on your resume?
- Engineering Interviews:
- Research Research Research
- The more you know the more you can be prepared
- Remember that if you get this job you could spend 1/3rd of your life there
- You are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you
- Dress appropriately
- Under dressed is not helpful - Avoid if possible
- Come prepared - No place is going to fault you for bringing things in
- Bring multiple copies of your resumes
- Bring your work
- Personality Tests
- How to prep for these kind of questions?
- "What is your greatest weakness?"
1 hr 22 min - MEP EP#278: Design With Manufacturing - Altium and MacroFab
MEP EP#278: Design With Manufacturing - Altium and MacroFab
- Ted Pawela
- Altium's Chief Ecosystem Officer
- Head of Nexar, Altium's cloud business unit
- Holds a M.S. in Engineering Mechanics from Michigan State University, a B.S in. Oceanographic Technology from Florida Institute of Technology and an M.B.A. from IE Business School, Madrid, Spain
- Chris Church
- Is a founder and the Chief Product Officer at MacroFab
- Has been working in the software industry for over twenty years, with a focus on robotics and electronics over the last decade
- Prior to MacroFab, he founded Dynamic Perception and Alert Logic
- Recent fundraising press release
- Altium's goals around connecting design engineers to manufacturing data
- Perspective on the role and level of control engineers have in manufacturing?
- Will engineers take on a much bigger role with electronics production?
- What about engineers being equally important to the supply chain and procurement process?
- What are you hearing from the engineers themselves? Are they pushing Altium to do more to enable manufacturing?
- What exactly is Nexar? How do you envision these services evolving?
- How MacroFab and Altium will work together to improve the design to manufacturing experience
- What are y’all looking forward to the most with this collaboration?
1 hr 19 min - MEP EP#277: Bunch of Nibbles
MEP EP#277: Bunch of Nibbles
- Tasty Chips segment
- Harwin EZ-Cable Clips
- Mac-Eight CZ series
- Update - E-Z Hook Insulation Piercing Wire Clamp - 8507
- Built a housing to isolate the wire clamps
- COM port snooper / sniffer?
- Ended up using 'Free Serial Analyzer'
- Automating Testing Clock Drift
- Using an oscilloscope?
- SCPI or some other method?
- 115 pages of commands
- What is inside a scope probe? 10X?
- Rotary switch pcb - interesting bug?
- Pcb is 99% done - currently reviewing
- MF platform experience
- https://github.com/analogeng
- 49 unique resistor values 92 total resistors
- List of most used resistors
- Potentially bad bug in Diptrace
- Causes lots of headaches
- Injection Molded Actuators
- They work great
- Shrinkage - Identifying and dealing with it
- Voids - problematic for light passage
58 min - MEP EP#276: Skippy Documentation
MEP EP#276: Skippy Documentation
- Fake LM338 Voltage Regulators?
- X-RAY results
- Should we Xray legit LM137 and see if the XRAY matches?
- SCPI or Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments
- IEEE 488.2-1987
- Send command strings over serial to configure and get results from test equipment
- Test equipment mostly adhere to this with some weird gotchas
- COM port snooper / sniffer?
- Is there good software out there that can sniff the buffers / communication string between Windows and a hardware device?
- Is bad documentation worse than no documentation?
- “With no documentation you know immediately you're fucked.”
- Bringing back the Tasty Chips segment - E-Z Hook Insulation Piercing Wire Clamp - 8507
- Spring loaded clamp that has teeth
- When you insert a wire the teeth slice into the insulation making contact
- Datasheet specifications are interesting to say the least!
- Max Current 1 AMP
- Max Voltage 0 V ?!?
- Covering the Amplifier
- Update on Parker’s Amp “refinishing” project
- Adventures in plastic molding
- Getting custom actuator parts injection molded
- First prototype parts got shot this week
- What to expect
- Provide model to company
- Initial review
- DFM report
- Release for prototype
- 5 to 6 weeks for the initial mold to be cut
- Prototype units are shot and sent for approval
- Second round of mold adjustments are cut - 2 weeks
- Second prototype units are shot and sent for approval
- Mold is sent to US
- Production is run
- Mold cost ~12k
- Half up front
- Remainder at time of delivery
- Includes all DFM and both prototypes
- Previous solution was about $35/unit
- New solution with dome snap switches and injection molded plastic is about $23 to $27/unit
1 hr 7 min - Fake LM338 Voltage Regulators?
- MEP EP#275: Log Stepping Revision Control
MEP EP#275: Log Stepping Revision Control
- Log stepper
- Exercise in madness
- 24 position stepped attenuator
- 1db steps with step 0 being -infinite and step 24 being 0db attenuation
- Requires lots of non standard resistor values
- Constant total resistance
- Excel sheet
- Make before break operation
- Revision workflow
- How do you document and handle revisions for schematics and pcbs?
- Process
- Get new rev
- Go to testing
- Find issues and document
- Make new revision
- Repeat
- Venturing into hobby level SLA printing
- Elegoo Mars 2
- Quality is amazing
- Print speed is interesting
- Will have to experiment with different resins to find a high strength, high temperature
- Plating process to test
- Amplifier update
- Live next week on parts replacement?
- Recovering it
58 min
About Circuit Break - A MacroFab Podcast
From the publisher's feed
Dive into the electrifying world of electrical engineering with Circuit Break, a MacroFab podcast hosted by Parker Dillmann and Stephen Kraig. This dynamic duo, armed with practical experience and a palpable passion for tech, explores the latest innovations, industry news, and practical challenges in the field. From DIY project hurdles to deep dives with industry experts, Parker and Stephen's real-world insights provide an engaging learning experience that bridges theory and practice for engineers at any stage of their career.
Whether you're a student eager to grasp what the job market seeks, or an engineer keen to stay ahead in the fast-paced tech world, Circuit Break is your go-to. The hosts, alongside a vibrant community of engineers, makers, and leaders, dissect product evolutions, demystify the journey of tech from lab to market, and reverse engineer the processes behind groundbreaking advancements. Their candid discussions not only enlighten but also inspire listeners to explore the limitless possibilities within electrical engineering.
Presented by MacroFab, a leader in electronics manufacturing services, Circuit Break connects listeners directly to the forefront of PCB design, assembly, and innovation. MacroFab's platform exemplifies the seamless integration of design and manufacturing, catering to a broad audience from hobbyists to professionals.
About the hosts: Parker, an expert in Embedded System Design and DSP, and Stephen, an aficionado of audio electronics and brewing tech, bring a wealth of knowledge and a unique perspective to the show. Their backgrounds in engineering and hands-on projects make each episode a blend of expertise, enthusiasm, and practical advice.
Join the conversation and community at our online engineering forum, where we delve deeper into each episode's content, gather your feedback, and explore the topics you're curious about. Subscribe to Circuit Break on your favorite podcast platform and become part of our journey through the fascinating world of electrical engineering.
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