Circuit Break Podcast #99

Moses Parting the Sea of Traces

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December 21, 2017, Episode #99

Parker and Stephen discuss using PCB materials for enclosures, distance sensing, and EDA tool updates.
  • PCB material as structural elements and enclosures
    • FR4 Material – glass-reinforced epoxy laminate sheets
    • Custom face plates aren’t cheap – the solution? Face plate out of PCB material!
    • Silk screening and milling
    • Easy to order
    • Get to use the same design tool for PCBs
  • P.O.W. (Part of the Week)
    • From Bryan with Poetic.io
      • “Do you have a guy that knows lots about sensors? I need one that will tell me the distance to any solid material out to a range of about 60 feet. Could be ultrasonic but not sure there’s one that’s strong enough.”
      • Microwave kit 24GHz radar evaluation kit
      • K-LD2-EVAL
      • How do lasers find absolute distance? Comment below with your answers.
  • R.F.O. (Rapid Fire Opinion)
  • MacroFab Hiring!

Visit our Slack Channel and join the conversation in between episodes!

Start of Stephen’s new Synth.

Start of Stephen’s new Synth.

Synth module with Fr4 face plate.

Synth module with Fr4 face plate.

About the Hosts

Parker Dillmann
  Parker Dillmann

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
  Stephen Kraig

Stephen Kraig is a component engineer working in the aerospace industry. He has applied his electrical engineering knowledge in a variety of contexts previously, including oil and gas, contract manufacturing, audio electronic repair, and synthesizer design. A graduate of Texas A&M, Stephen has lived his adult life in the Houston, TX, and Denver, CO, areas.

Stephen has never said no to a project. From building guitar amps (starting when he was 17) to designing and building his own CNC table to fine-tuning the mineral composition of the water he uses to brew beer, he thrives on testing, experimentation, and problem-solving. Tune into the podcast to learn more about the wacky stuff Stephen gets up to.

Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!

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