Mandatory USB Type-C for everything? Parker and Stephen discuss the current EU ruling and preparing your PCBA design for contract manufacturing!
Parker and Stephen discover new EDA tool features in both Eagle and Diptrace! The Auto industry is now waking up to a new tech order of the world.
Does anyone actually use the metric sizing for chip components? The ole' 0603 metric and 0201 imperial chip component switcheroo on this episode.
Figure 1: Image from the BGA Escape article.
Figure 2: Board layout for the Molex 105450-0101.
Parker is an Electrical Engineer with backgrounds in Embedded System Design and Digital Signal Processing. He got his start in 2005 by hacking Nintendo consoles into portable gaming units. The following year he designed and produced an Atari 2600 video mod to allow the Atari to display a crisp, RF fuzz free picture on newer TVs. Over a thousand Atari video mods where produced by Parker from 2006 to 2011 and the mod is still made by other enthusiasts in the Atari community.
In 2006, Parker enrolled at The University of Texas at Austin as a Petroleum Engineer. After realizing electronics was his passion he switched majors in 2007 to Electrical and Computer Engineering. Following his previous background in making the Atari 2600 video mod, Parker decided to take more board layout classes and circuit design classes. Other areas of study include robotics, microcontroller theory and design, FPGA development with VHDL and Verilog, and image and signal processing with DSPs. In 2010, Parker won a Ti sponsored Launchpad programming and design contest that was held by the IEEE CS chapter at the University. Parker graduated with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Spring of 2012.
In the Summer of 2012, Parker was hired on as an Electrical Engineer at Dynamic Perception to design and prototype new electronic products. Here, Parker learned about full product development cycles and honed his board layout skills. Seeing the difficulties in managing operations and FCC/CE compliance testing, Parker thought there had to be a better way for small electronic companies to get their product out in customer's hands.
Parker also runs the blog, longhornengineer.com, where he posts his personal projects, technical guides, and appnotes about board layout design and components.
Stephen Kraig began his electronics career by building musical oriented circuits in 2003. Stephen is an avid guitar player and, in his down time, manufactures audio electronics including guitar amplifiers, pedals, and pro audio gear. Stephen graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University.
Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!
Hello, and welcome to the macro fab engineering podcast. We're your hosts, Steven
Craig and Parker, Dolman.
So this week been working on some, some deep trace stuff and getting some Detroit's files. And some articles ready?
Yep. So last week was Eagle, right libraries and this week is DipTrace, get trace
libraries, dip trace templates and deploy trace rule files. Yep. So all the libraries getting kind of updated, the rule files have all the DRC stuff in it. And then I created some, some template dip trace files that are up on our GitHub, where you can, if you're starting a new file, or a new PCB, with dip trace, you can just load up this, this file and there are four of them. And each one you can go and grab. And they have all of the, the information on for the for the different DRC manufacturing capabilities. So actually, I publish three of them. One for two layer, one for for layer and one for sixth layer. So say you want to do a four layer board with you know, three mil traces, go and download the the four layer template, and then in the DRC, you can select the extended manufacturing, and you will now be set up to do a four layer board.
So you can you can in that template, you can change what to what standard you using them. Yeah, that's right. So that way, it's um, if you're not designing something from the get go and then go, Oh, crap, I need, you know, a three mil trace here and start over.
Right. So in that case, all you would do is there's a pulldown list, you would just pull down and go to whatever extra thing you need, like the extended manufacturing, which takes your trace width from five mils down to three mils. And your annular rings from six mil down to three mil. Yep. And then you just move to that template. And it'll automatically update the DRC. And you're good to go. Awesome. So it makes things a lot easier. Yep. And there will be a an article coming out soon. That shows people how to
do that. Yeah. And then you had a BGA scape article.
Yeah. So we talked about the first BGA article a couple podcasts ago. The first article was about creating pads for BGA footprints. Do you choose solder mask to find pads or non solder mask to find pads? So I we released the the next article the the second part of that this week, which is talking about escaping or routing traces out of BGA.
Yeah, that was a, this article took a long time for you to write just so much information. So flew
PGAS are not easy to deal with. And there's so many different rules, based off of you know, if you have this, you do this blah, blah, blah. So I tried to distill all of that down and present in the least amount of information, the most amount of information information, right, right. In the least amount of words, the most amount of information. Yeah. So yeah, go check it out. Go Go read both articles, the one about creating pads, and then the one about getting traces out. And, you know, you read those, you should be able to use a BGA on any of your projects.
Yeah. And then this week, I was working more on USB type C. I think last week I was talking about I finally got like it working in our standard manufacturing, which is five mil traces, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's a Molex port number 105450 Dash 0101 It's all SMD MOLEX connector. Yeah, type see. I really like it. I think my favorite thing about it is it gives you a little like positive snap kind of when you plug in the connector. Yeah, this little little nine. Oh, you're connected. Yeah. You know, you're connected. And so I actually just put up a
gosh, if I was making a connector company, that would be my slogan. You know, you're connected. You know, you're connect with blah, blah, blah, connectors.
Steven interconnect, Steve and Steve Connect.
Yeah, that yeah,
that Oh, no, just Craig in or interconnect. Oh, I like that at Craig interconnect.
All right. Yeah. I'm starting to connect a company Craig to connect. Okay,
I with proper data sheets, right?
Yeah, no, no, no, I can't No, it's impossible. You're not allowed to have a good data sheet. It's an electronic component. It's gonna be terrible nodes,
electronic connector components have dimensions that don't relate to each other. And you don't have a 00 point on that.
Well, and on top of that, I'm going to have one datasheet for every connector. I make one that just shows like, a generic footprint. And you have to kind of like, get the idea of
all I know, it has like a like a chart that you have to reference. Yeah, but then short is like eight pages long
and it's in a different datasheet. Right, right, right. Yeah. No, it's in the opinion. I have a different datasheet Yes, right. Perfect. Welcome to Craig interconnect. Yeah. Servicing you,
connecting you
know you're connected. Continue.
Yeah. And then we started up working on KiCad footprints, right. And one thing I noticed about KiCad footprints I did not know this is they, they, since I think 4.0, they started separating out libraries into like, their own folders and components and individual, like, the parts get their own files now. It's not like, Eagle where you have like MF dash connectors. And then like, all your connectors are in one XML file. Yeah, it's a separates everything else else, which I guess it's good for. If you need to copy paste stuff, it's a lot faster.
Well, yeah, and dip trace is the same as Eagle where your your footprints are all within you, you lump them in groups. So like I have, I have the Steven Craig footprint group, and I have the Steven Craig Park group. But KiCad does them as individual files for every footprint.
Yeah. And they put them in a folder. That's whatever you named library dot pretty.
Which, why? You know, so the thing is, I guess they're trying to get away from like, it's so easy for EDA tools to do.sc H first schematic dot PCB for PCB and.li. B for a library file. I guess they wanted to be different, I guess so. And so this week, I was actually doing a quote for a customer for some DFM stuff. And, of course, since I act like I'm 12 years old, I named his file like a temp file, I named it poop. And I was just working on this file called poop. And I exported all of his libraries, and it named it pooped up pretty. Like, wow. Wow, I'm 12.
I think it was just the key CAD developers just want to instill like, a positive esteem into KY CAD.
It always makes you feel good. Yeah, it always
makes you feel good. You open up and says that pretty.
You know, actually something that I was trying to do today in KY CAD, and maybe one of our listeners can tell me I, to be honest, I haven't used a lot of KY CAD, I've played with it a little bit, never really made a board in it. I brought in a board and I wanted to find information about the board. How many footprints are on the board? How many components are on the board? I want to just generic information, metadata metadata. Yeah, I want metadata and Eagle has a ULP that will just give you all of that dip Trace has you go File design information, and it tells you how many nets how many blah, blah, blah, it tells you all this stuff. I couldn't find anything in KiCad. I literally had to export the libraries and count the footprints. So like, maybe I'm just missing something. I don't know.
Maybe there's some script or some hidden file. Well, okay,
so they have a scripting language and Dustin, at macro fab. He combined is like, oh, yeah, I can get you that. And he just wrote some code real quick. I'm like, I don't want to have to write code that just get some information. Yeah, you know, that'd be like, in Eagle. If you want to information, you had to write a ULP. Yeah. You don't want to have to do that. Is your piece
already written?
It? Yeah, it is written but like, as the as a designer of just a generic board or for me, I just wanted to get some quick information. I didn't want to have to do that. It just seems kind of odd that KY CAD wouldn't have that, but maybe it does. And I was just missing it.
Yeah. It's probably under like, edit or something. Yeah.
I'll look again. Yeah, maybe I'm just a doofus.
We're all doofuses. Oh, that's what we did this week, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the RFO Yeah. This is awesome for Steven. There was a
right along with my
thought poop dot pretty. This is a toilet seat that tells you how much your excrement weighs. So I like use that word. So just poop.
excrement? Yeah. Fantastic. It makes it
sound at least 16.
Right. I'm 29 and I still laugh at the body body humor. poop jokes. So okay, this is a scale Yes, but it's built into a toilet seat toilet
seat. So when you sit down first of all though, whose legs are short enough they're not touching the floor when you sit down toilet
and you have to like sit there like really still. Yeah, but then you have to pick Your feet up. That's weird. Yeah, it's like, I don't
really understand how. Anyways, that's a technicality aside. Um, but yeah, IoT toilet exists on toilet seat you measured
before and after. Yeah. And you take a delta, and then you and then you write it on the wall next to you. So everyone else you could compare a
kid goes up to like the door sill and you're like, mark off how tall he is. My proof weighed 1.2 pounds today. Oh, this
podcast is going downhill fast.
Yeah, that's actually what I was thought of is like, this wouldn't be used for health reasons. This would be who could take the largest poop.
Oh, yeah. No, this is this is a total. This was designed by a dude. And this was meant for like, him and his buddies. You know, I could see this going well in like a college house. Or something like, you know. i But phenomenal idea. Thumbs up? Yeah. Interesting idea. potty humor. Um,
there's a new Android phone as lots of Android phones. But this was one is made by Motorola, the Moto Z. It supports DIY and raspberry pi hat add ons. Yeah. So that it's so you basically pop the back off and you can slide in, basically DIY hardware and then put the backpack on.
It's pretty it's pretty nifty that accompany that large is paying attention to guys who want to modify their product.
Yeah, the phone and doing a lot of stuff. It's got those, they call it the Moto Mods. backplate expansion system. That's an interesting name. And I don't really like the name because it's not an acronym or something, you know, like the same machine.
P O P. There's a theme to this. And then,
and there's also like, there's different add on boards you can get for like, it's like temperature, add on screens, lights, all that stuff. Then they have a perf. Board one, so you can just solder up your own stuff, huh? Which is cool. So wait.
Okay, so does it have access to signals in the phone?
I don't, I think it's an expansion bus. And so you have to pass data to it or get data from it.
So there's, I guess there would be some kind of front end app.
Yeah, there's actually a they actually have their own SDK called the Moto mod Android SDK. That's awesome. And allows Android apps to talk to this crap.
You know what voltage level it is? No idea. Huh? This that's pretty.
And the cool thing about this stuff is you can buy it now. It's not a vaporware. Where, huh. vaporware vaporware. Yeah, yeah, you can buy this stuff now. How much is it? I think the starter stuff was 125 bucks.
Okay. Which isn't bad. No, no, no, not bad at all.
I think it's on element 14. Which just got bought out but whatever.
That's the Yeah, I liked it. That's that's pretty cool. Being able to get into your phone without forcefully having to damage it.
Yeah, I'm, I'm gonna try to get my hands on some of this hardware. I think it'd be pretty cool. Yeah.
Just put a put a new tube in there. Yeah,
I put a new tube in there. Or a phone that has a lab power supply built in.
God you just eat through the battery.
The battery but sometimes you need that 3.3 volts, man.
Yeah. You need it real bad. Did it rot away? Oh, bad.
Can't walk across the room to your lab power supply.
Or you or you have a phone that boosts your 3.3 up to 19 volts and you charge a laptop
off of it. Oh, this is back to type C 100 Watt charging now, huh?
Yeah. And it would just completely demolish your phone. Yeah,
in about 30 minutes. Yeah. What else could you do with this thing? I was looking at some people are designing external controllers that your phone snaps into? I mean, those kind of exists already. But they talk over USB.
Yeah. I guess if you want okay, so the thing is,
this is more like adding instead of like a USB thing. I think it's more like adding different kinds of sensors to your phone.
But But phones already have so many sensors on them. Like if you pull up your your your data in the background or your phone. I can do it on my phone right now. I mean, there's so much crap in there. That is constantly reading
doesn't have a poop sensor.
Ah, methane. Yeah, you gotta catch that. So when you're sitting on the toilet scale You can Yeah, that makes sense. I got Yep.
Or you can make a breathalyzer that's built into your phone. I use those but the USB and so it will stop you from texting if you're over a certain blood alcohol content. Yeah. And not allow the tweet. If you're had three or four beers,
you can't say really embarrassing
thing. Are you sure you want to text her ex blow into the phone now?
That's actually pretty good. People would buy that again, by that. So can you only fit one board in there? Or can you like stack them?
A one board? Okay, but you can put as much stuff I think as you want onto it. Oh, do they
have? Is there like a template? So if you want to actually manufacture a board?
I don't know.
That would be cool. I'm not sure there is that we shouldn't make a template for this. Yeah. And put it up on our you know, yeah. Especially if all the connections and stuff are already set. And it already has all the part numbers and everything. No. Such as you just played on
board? Actually. I think it's like a knife edge kind of connection. Oh, is
it really? Yeah. Okay. Well, that's pretty cool. It kind
of slides in like a SIM card, except it's a, you know, a PCB looks like about two by three inches.
We need to come up with some cool ideas. Yeah. Something that. Cuz Yeah, it just seems like what would you do? You would add more sensors? I get okay. So I guess you could add ADCs that measure all kinds of weird stuff or something like, yeah, I just, that's all I can think of right now. I'm sure there's something.
Yeah, that's true. There's someone's working out, like you think about adding different kinds of sensors to your phone.
You know, what could be cool is, but I guess you could do it with a camera, you could put, you could put a color sensor. So you put your phone on something, and it would detect the color of whatever it was.
That's actually what some of these, like examples they give on their site. They say like infrared cameras, Inc, displays, game controllers, printers, to metal detectors, in taury Tag readers, but you can do that with the camera. blood pressure monitors, air pollution sensors. Basically, it's a whole list of just sensors. Yeah. Except printers.
I suppose you Okay, so get this, you could potentially put a touchscreen on the backside of your phone. So that if you're holding in one hand, your thumb operates the front touchscreen, and your other fingers can operate the back touchscreen. Yeah, I mean, it would, it seems like you'd have to learn how to Yeah, how do you do that? Yeah, that seems really tough. But it's something that could be done. I don't know. I'm just my brain starting to work now. Clearly, it wasn't before we were talking about potty humor.
Yeah. I think it's a really cool idea. Um, I think was at Google was trying to do a modular phone a while back, and never really took off. At all. I don't think anyone was able to buy hardware for it or anything. But uh, yeah, you can actually buy this now. That's cool.
where were at? Oh, my 14. Oh, okay. Are they the sole distributor? Probably think so. Cool. Somebody is going to come up with something cool. Yeah.
Oops, sensors. Do it. Measures methane content. It's
a challenge. Ah,
so this month, is it September? Yep. And so college is starting to kick back up.
It is not September. August. It is August.
Okay. It's August. Kick back up.
School. Yeah. We won't be releasing this for a couple of weeks. But okay, school is about to come back. Well, high schools coming back colleges usually September.
Yes. Yeah. They're already in session then. Yeah, I don't remember.
I think I think grade schools already back in school. Or if not, it'll be like tomorrow.
Yeah. Um, and actually saw this the amp hour was asking like, what advice would you have for freshmen engineers? And I was like, how we should steal that idea. But I thought a little bit different way of phrasing is as a freshman engineer, what would you buy to get a leg up on your your other classmates? Yeah, classmates, like, instead of like advice to give them like, just buy this stuff.
Just be really direct about Yeah, I would almost say like, like a survival kit.
Yeah, I would say Learning or getting stuff to help you out and your electronic labs. Yeah, is number one. So I would say buy art or the electronics.
By Horowitz and Hill. Yep, yeah. Killer book.
Yep. And then buy a really good breadboard with some wire jumpers
right and buy really good. It probably isn't going to cost more than say $30. Yep. But don't buy like a $1.
Yeah, correct. Buy a really nice one. And use that in all your labs. Screw whatever your last prompt there, you will look like
the biggest dork bring in your own equipment. But if you're going into electrical engineering, you're already a dork. just yet, just do it. Just do it. Yeah, process it. I had labs that that were crappy. Because the crap that my TA gave me was bad. Yes, I have that same problem, not because any of my homework was bad. And then yeah,
read the electronics and start doing the examples. Like actually go get some transistors, get some resistors get some caps, some LEDs, and start building oscillators out of transistors and learning that stuff, the basic low level stuff that you you probably won't even touch until your second year?
Yes. But you will be. You'll be lightyears ahead of people. Yeah. Trust me. I remember being a senior in electrical engineering. And there were some guys who could not turn on a light bulb I swear to God could not turn on a light bulb. Electrically they couldn't even draw the schematic for it. It's not hard to get better than that. You know? No, I think that's a I think we're okay. We weren't necessarily going for advice. But I think I think that's I think that's good. That's that's perfect. Good. And and all said and done. That's like 150 bucks. cheaper than the book is the most expensive thing. They're still it's cheaper than the first calculus textbook you
have to buy. Yeah, $300 textbook that you open up a time's right.
Also make friends with with the guys in the electrical department. Because if you need parts, a lot of times they'll just give them to you. Yep. If not, Mouser is your friend. And you can usually buy everything you need there.
Oh, you don't really do was that we need to put together a blog post. That'd be cool. A intro. A student's guide to your first electronics lab. Ooh, I like that title. But and then have a like, here's a cheap power supply that you can. I think we should make it that you make like a LM 317 with a potentially ometer and heat sink
which frankly will get you through 99.9% Of all the labs in electrical engineering. Yep.
College. Yep. And then so you take like a wall charger, hook that up to the three lm 317. Yeah, well, that's up, get like, find like a, you know, 15 $20 multimeter. Yep. And actually, I use at home a $15 multimeter for everything I do. People will like, oh, no, you need to get a fluke. I'm like, No, you can spend your money built best elsewhere.
Well, okay, I'm gonna play devil's advocate. You don't do a lot of analog circuits. You do you do a bit more digital.
Yeah, but most students are not going to be doing analog true. Okay, true. Even digital stuff is. So high in Fluke is you're going to get better isolation
than the cheap stuff. You're going to get higher resolution.
Arguably the low level flukes that are like 150 bucks still only go out to two decimal places.
Yeah, but the nice ones go out to like four.
Yeah, but that's like, I'm thinking like, you build this whole, like, Intro lab thing for Lytro lab. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's I'm saying, like, your budget is like, beer money.
You show up to your first lab in college with a fluke in your hand. That means that like, your dad was a web and he did like projects with you in the basement your entire life. Oh, yeah, that's the only way that could ever happen. Yeah, yeah. You're gonna get the Radio Shack banger. You know, when you first start out
and like, cheap power supply, a cheap microcontroller dem platform. Arduino, Arduino. Maybe like a DLA digital logic analyzer, a cheap one. It's like 2030 bucks. I think you can go and a scope up first, but maybe figure out some way to supplement that. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I think we should come up with a like the cheapest you can build a decent lab. and build stuff. Well, we should
also throw in the art of electronics on that and say, what if? What if you could have the whole kit and caboodle for 200 bucks, including the book? Yeah,
I think so. I think
we could pull that off. Yeah. Yeah.
And also go as far as making a part list for like, make a part list for the art of electronics book. Yeah. So when you work through some of the examples, you already have those parts on hand. Yep. Yeah, that'd be awesome. And stuff
in like simple stuff. Like here's making a difference amplifier or an inverting amplifier, or, you know, something like that. an op amp and two resistors. Done. You got it. Ooh, some way of creating a signal. Well, you know what, you can do it with your phone. If you don't really care that much about super high accuracy. If you're looking to just see the operation of the circuit. There you go. Your phone. Oh,
I'll put three on the headphone amp on the headphone. Yeah. Didn't make frequency generator apps. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. No, I do that all the time. You don't I think we should just be our next article that we next big article we come out with
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this will be fun. Awesome. Yeah, we're nerding out now. Yeah.
I'm gonna join this.
Yeah. No, that that'll that'll be good. We could give a list of apps on your phone that you pick up. And then a list of parts and all kinds of stuff. Yeah, this that'll be good. Sweet. Yes. Yes. Well, sounds like we got another project to do.
Yeah, that's another big that's gonna be a big one. But yeah, a lot of fun. I think we very helpful.
Yeah, let's let's do that one together. Let's have fun with that one.
I so look for that article next month. So yeah, um,
in the next month, which is September
September. Yeah. That was the Mac Feb engineering podcast. We were your hosts Parker Dohmen. And Steven Craig. Later guys, take it easy.
Does anyone actually use the metric sizing for chip components? The ole' 0603 metric and 0201 imperial chip component switcheroo on this episode.
Parker and Stephen discover new EDA tool features in both Eagle and Diptrace! The Auto industry is now waking up to a new tech order of the world.
Mandatory USB Type-C for everything? Parker and Stephen discuss the current EU ruling and preparing your PCBA design for contract manufacturing!