- MacroFab and Mouser Electronics have teamed up to create a free monthly meetup in Houston for anyone involved with hardware & electronics engineering or manufacturing. Hosted on the last Wednesday of every month, these meetups are designed to build a community of professionals who want to learn from one another, gain new insights on emerging electronics technologies, and expand their network.
- Sign up here!
- What to expect
- Networking
- Fireside chats with Q&A
- Individual project sharing and discussion
- Door prizes
- Refreshments
- Free parking
- Christian Aurich writes: “Could you talk about differences in surface finishes on PCBs? I am especially wondering what difference ENIG makes to other ‘flat’ finishes… so everything else than HAL.”
- HASL (Leadfree and Leaded)
- ENIG
- Immersion Tin
- Immersion Silver
- OSP (Organic Solderability Preservative)
- Gold – Hard Gold
- PDF on pros and cons
- Parker
- Working on a LVDS output board for the RPI 3
- Parallel Display Interface on the RPI3
- Config.txt parameters and by enabling the correct Linux Device Tree
- Using the Ti DS90C365A. It converts a RGB666 signal to a LVDS signal for LCD panels. You give it 6 bits for ever color, pixel clock, H clock and V clock and poof LVDS.
- Stephen
- Bench Stats:
- 80/20 construction
- 1 5/8″ plastic laminate table top
- 60″x30″ with adjustable height between 30.625″ to 32.625″
- Total Length of 80/20 per bench: 40.33 feet
- 42 angle brackets
- 84 nuts/bolts
- ~68.5 lbs
- Particles from outer space are wreaking low-grade havoc on personal electronics
- Click bait? In many instances, however, these operational failures may be caused by the impact of electrically charged particles generated by cosmic rays that originate outside the solar system.
- This is called a single-event upset or SEU
- SEU failure rates for consumer electronic devices performed by Ritesh Mastipuram and Edwin Wee at Cypress Semiconductor on a previous generation of technology shows how prevalent the problem may be. Their results were published in 2004 in Electronic Design News and provided the following estimates:
- A simple cell phone with 500 kilobytes of memory should only have one potential error every 28 years.
- A router farm like those used by Internet providers with only 25 gigabytes of memory may experience one potential networking error that interrupts their operation every 17 hours.
- A person flying in an airplane at 35,000 feet (where radiation levels are considerably higher than they are at sea level) who is working on a laptop with 500 kilobytes of memory may experience one potential error every five hours.
- The engineer’s bottom line: “This is a major problem for industry and engineers, but it isn’t something that members of the general public need to worry much about.”
Hosts: Parker Dillmann, Stephen Kraig
Special thanks to whixr over at Tymkrs for the intro and outro!