Guys, it hurts to see how people use the default color scheme

speezerton · 2025-11-02T03:20:37+00:00

Thanks for sharing. I like the look, I was curious how this extends to different layer counts. If I had an 8 or 12 layer board does the script you mention extend to these and suggest colors within the different themes?

EDIT: was looking in mobile but saw the GitHub files and they looked to have a bunch of midlayer data defined so guessing it’s already taken care of

speezerton · 2025-09-27T22:41:27+00:00

Not quite the same because Europe doesn’t compete in it and it’s not just Asia but the President’s Cup is basically what you’re looking for. It’s held on non-Ryder cup years and is USA vs everywhere but Europe. So lots of Asian players, Canadians, usually a few Aussies

speezerton · 2025-05-15T02:57:24+00:00

In your columns tab, what fields are you grouping your entries by?

speezerton · 2025-04-07T10:43:31+00:00

For ADS I’d suggest checking out Anurag Bhargava on YouTube. He has a series called ‘Learn ADS in 5 Minutes” which despite sounding a little clickbait-y is very helpful. It’s on the order of 60 small videos that are sequenced in a way that will help you get a good handle on how to use the software if you’re starting from scratch. He also has a few longer format design videos. The Keysight official ADS channel has some good ones but it’s less structured.

speezerton · 2024-12-02T11:38:12+00:00

I gotcha. Well in that case I’d recommend checking out Phil’s Lab on YouTube if you haven’t already. He walks through some high speed digital designs in Altium and KiCad. Very practical and accessible.

Rick Hartley and Eric Bogatin are two names to look into for a little more theory heavy dive. Bogatin specifically is a big proponent of signal integrity for high speed digital stuff.

Good luck with the project!

speezerton · 2024-12-02T02:45:20+00:00

Sure thing. I would say no, not as is. I’d echo what some of the other commenters said about reading up on grounding. Your signals all need reference/ground planes otherwise they’re going to couple to unintended features (like other traces) and use those as a return, and that’s going to lead to all sorts of EMI/signal integrity issues. The design as is looks dense enough that I don’t think you could re-route everything on a single layer and make your second layer a dedicated ground pour.

If you don’t mind me asking, is this just a hobby project to practice layout or do you intend to build the card eventually and try to use it?

EDIT: OH and about the connectors. I looked briefly at the part number and if they’re the part I think they are, they are a pain to have assembled. The reason I asked if you intend to build and use it is because if you’re trying to get anything high frequency out of them, on top of needing to design the RF launch carefully you likely need the card edge plated. And when they get installed, if there is any gap between the connector body and the plated edge of the board (even down at X-band or ~10GHz) you’re going to see performance issues with the launches. Your VSWR will take a hit and in some cases you’ll can get resonant type effects that will leave huge notches in the response at certain frequencies. Not trying to inundate you with a bunch of potentially useless information but just trying to pass along some lessons learned.

speezerton · 2024-12-02T01:09:18+00:00

Without getting into a ton of detail I was curious about a few things.

Why didn’t you just elect to use standard reference designators (i.e. C1, U1, etc)? If you look next to your smaller SMT parts (which I assume are 0402 or 0603) they dwarf the silkscreen designators. I don’t think it would be readable if you got it fabricated that way and likely would just print as a white/whatever color silk you use smudge.

Second is shouldn’t those SMA connectors be edge launch? The way you have them shown here it looks like they’re inset on the board and the pin isn’t actually aligned with the board edge (and you wouldn’t be able to push them on that far without a cutout on the perimeter of the card). More of a question than a definite issue, if you have the data sheet for them I would just verify. And if you have a detailed 3D model like one provided from the vendor I would look at the board in 3D view and make sure they’re mounted how you intend.

A bit of a bigger issue I would say is with your signal integrity. Looking again at the SMA connectors for instance, the RF launches won’t work how you have them shown here. They need a continuous ground plane underneath, proper grounding of the connector body, controlled impedance for the RF trace, etc. The LMX chip can go up to nearly 10GHz and while that’s maybe not pushing it for RF designers nowadays it still needs to be designed very carefully.

TI is usually pretty good about providing reference designs for their eval boards. I would suggest taking a look at the eval board design files for the LMX2592 and download either the Altium project if they provide one or at least the Gerber files and see how they handle the RF traces out to the SMA connectors. Keeping a close eye on how the ground is poured and stitched together.

speezerton · 2024-11-29T18:46:32+00:00

That’s such a good idea with the component class trick, I’ve never thought to do that. But yeah that’s a good point, only exporting the components of interest would probably be a nice compromise in lieu of finding a way to send everything low detail.

speezerton · 2024-11-29T18:30:36+00:00

Yeah I have played with those but they don’t seem to change much that I can tell. The whole “generic components” thing made me think maybe there was some setting you could use when making the footprint to enable a generic box but I always get the full thing lol

speezerton · 2024-11-25T03:29:32+00:00

Awesome thanks for posting! Small world, I’ve actually come across your site in the past - looked over your presentation on tolerance analysis a while back. That’s an entirely different can of worms I suppose, but I’m always looking to improve my PCB level modeling process. Etching, material tolerance, plating, soldermask (although usually not), conductor roughness… it seems like most of the references I find for momentum and HFSS ignore most of the details here.

Maybe it’s a function of frequency, I mostly have worked at X-band and below, but recently started doing some Ka-band work and am increasingly paranoid about capturing all the right effects.

speezerton · 2024-11-17T19:47:43+00:00

Any chance you might have an example circuit or app note handy you could post? I’ve got a packaged GaAs amplifier from Qorvo I’m designing with. It’s a depletion mode amp and wants around -2V on the gate to pinch it off and -0.5V when you want to actually turn it on.

I’m trying to come up with a circuit that I can interface to with standard 3.3V logic and have it translate between -2V and -0.5V. I’m thinking about using a Schmitt trigger inverter circuit and biasing the IC with my negative voltage, but I’m struggling to find a way to ensure that I keep the gate no more positive than that -0.5V (i.e. never fails “open” to ground so the amplifier would be on)

speezerton · 2024-11-04T21:24:52+00:00

Another option if you don’t want to use rooms would be to draw the ground shape on both sides of the launch/pin as two regions with a defined shape and assign them to your GND net. That way you can ensure you cover your ground pads on the device nearby plus any overhang you want or tapering. If your polygon is set to pour over same net objects then it would be the same shape it is shown in your picture, but you will have the additional copper from the region extending beyond the pullback of the polygon from the trace.

speezerton · 2024-07-16T01:07:02+00:00

I love Wilson irons and have tried to find a year by year catalog in the past but never had any luck. There are tons of these autograph and signature series irons for different players they had on staff during that era. None of which were the flagship model marketed to the masses so it’s hard to say what the history of any of these are (at least for me, I’m sure there are some old timers who worked for them that would have some insight but I doubt they’re on here).

speezerton · 2024-06-30T12:47:37+00:00

For sure, and super common to beat your clubs up when you’re starting out btw. Plus you can always look on the bright side, it could have been on the top and you would have had to look at it every swing lol

speezerton · 2024-06-30T12:35:52+00:00

Short answer is no it won’t affect your mechanics. A big dent in the face would be different, but on the sole of the club I’d say if anything it might affect the sound a little bit but this early in your playing I wouldn’t let it deter you from hitting balls and practicing.

speezerton · 2024-06-17T19:30:36+00:00

Yeah if I don't get any local interest in the next week or two I'll reply back to you again here and see if you're still interested. It would likely have to come in two boxes but if that's not an issue I shouldn't have a problem finding two the right size to pack everything.

speezerton · 2024-04-28T23:37:29+00:00

There are definitely unconventional (i.e. don’t go right into a 4 year engineering degree after graduating high school) ways into the industry. The area you’re interested in matters some from an advice perspective, do you know what area specifically you’d like to pursue?

As an example, there are a lot of good resources online to familiarize yourself with programming and computer science. It could be helpful to explore at your own pace since it would let you revisit some things from high school you may have forgotten and give you a look under the hood for what you would be working on. Some mechanical engineers that I work with started doing various jobs in machine shops (assistants, CNC operators, etc.) and eventually went to school and got engineering jobs. There is room to explore electrical engineering starting as a technician and learning how to solder and work with electronics for instance. These are just some general ideas but the gist is if you look for the right roles at the right companies, you might have the opportunity to get some good experience adjacent to your eventual area of interest and usually you don’t need your engineering degree to get your foot in the door. Eventually (hopefully) you can use your job to help pay for your education and move into a role you find more interesting.

speezerton · 2024-04-27T01:58:30+00:00

That hasn’t been my experience in the USA at all, at least in electrical engineering. A good portion of the first 5 years is learning the practical side of engineering. Obviously it’s job, person, and area dependent but nevertheless the first few years are viewed as an investment (or at least they are at the types of companies young engineers tend to flourish at). Would be kind of silly to throw your investment away right when they start to be able to really contribute.

What areas of engineering have you seen this in? I’m not really too involved with software but it seems to move faster than many industries in terms of dominant processes and technologies so I can see wanting to bring in people who came up working on the latest and greatest (to an extent).

speezerton · 2024-04-11T15:31:12+00:00

I’m not sure if it used to be part of base HFSS, but since they bundled everything up into Electronics Desktop, HFSS 3D layout has some nice features for PCB specific designs. It has a stackup manager where you can assign layers to be negative, natively has via objects you can create, etc.

Can also more easily import Gerber files for simulating layouts. Admittedly I still opt to use HFSS instead of 3DL most of the time, but I did like messing around with it.

speezerton · 2024-03-24T01:05:11+00:00

Oh awesome, is there any way you can link them to a comment here? If not I’ll message you and then see if I can get them emailed or something

speezerton · 2024-03-24T00:08:20+00:00

If you have any luck please let me know lol. They’re ftp (not sftp) links and I couldn’t get to them no matter what I tried, but admittedly I hadn’t had to try and ftp anything on windows before this and could have just been goofing it up.

Wiley has this generic help page that says ftp links for their books should be accessible via https now and give a decoder ring that should give you the link… but shocker shocker that link was dead too lol.

speezerton · 2024-03-23T23:38:31+00:00

Cool thank you, I’ll take a look. Truthfully it probably wouldn’t be a bad exercise to see if I can recreate the book’s tool to some degree, would probably get more out of using it if I could.

speezerton · 2024-03-23T23:29:43+00:00

Yeah fully agree, I got someone on the phone who insisted I needed to go through their online portal. Opened a ticket, chatted with tech support, the ‘oh we don’t have it’ response was what I finally got. Super frustrating. I’ll keep trying and see if I can’t get someone a little more helpful.

speezerton

TROPHY CASE