Category

Blog

Category
Blog

6 Electronic Safety Tips I learned while Mountain Climbing

electronic safety tips

Electronic safety tips from mountain climbing? Yes! After spending two weeks in Europe for work, I had the chance to spend a weekend with friends in Germany. We hiked up Kampenwand in Bavaria. While working my way through the snow and rocks, I realized mountain climbing safety tips were the same as electronic safety tips. Really! Here’s how.

Grabbing a soldering iron and throwing polarized components around a circuit board is something I often do. So often, I don’t even realize I’m using some of these electronic safety tips. However, a new activity gives you a chance to exercise the safety portion of your brain. Especially when there are no guard rails.

While constantly wondering “why am I doing this again?” I thought about these 6 electronic safety tips that I learned while climbing a mountain.

Read More
Blog

Four Current Flow Myths Addressed

Current flow (direction) is the topic I’m planning for my next AddOhms tutorial. While preparing the script, I started to realize there are some myths or misunderstandings about electricity and current flow.

via Wikipedia

Everyone probably knows Ben Franklin. He discovered electricity, of course! Yet, he didn’t. Franklin was the first to prove that lightning was composed of electricity with his famous kite experiment. He was also the first to provide electricity’s well-known labels: positive and negative. And somewhere in there Franklin became famous for “inventing” conventional current flow.

This convention creates a lot of confusion around conventional and electron current flow. It’s a concept that has been covered by many others and may even be covered by an Electronics Tutorial Video Series in the future.

Instead, I want to explore some common current flow myths even I believed at some point.

Read More
Blog

Why do engineers (love to) hate Arduino?

A couple of months ago podcast I listen to interviewed an embedded engineer. Eventually, the topic of Arduino came up, and all three people on the show let of sighs of disgust. This lead to me to start thinking about why do engineers hate Arduino?

On this particular show, they said Arduino had too many abstraction layers to be useful. All three members of the panel agreed that direct hardware access was critical to success in embedded designs.

On the same episode, the same people talking, the topic changed to using a new chip or sensor. Then this comment was made: “I won’t design for a chip with no high-level software API and detailed examples.” (I’m paraphrasing to protect the innocent.) Everyone on the episode agreed.

Wow. Just what is Arduino then? One view is that it’s a well-documented board, with a high-level API, and lots of detailed examples. But somehow, these features on other platforms is desirable? So why do did these engineers hate Arduino so much when it is what they said every vendor should offer?

Are they haters? Are they trolls? Or are they just engineers who show a behavior common to humans. Let’s take a look at why engineers hate Arduino using other examples and concepts from psychology.

Read More
Around The Web

Top 25 Websites, Tools and Resources for Hardware Startups

Check out John Teel’s Top 25 Websites, Tools and Resources for Hardware Startups. Hardware startups have the unique challenge of having to spend real money, to physical products, with the end product being something … real.

You need all of the help you can get to succeed, which is why John’s list is worth a few minutes. I am familiar with many of the entries but did catch a few new ones. Personally, #9 is my favorite, but I am probably biased.

If his name looks familiar, that’s because John was featured here a few weeks ago with his post on how to go from prototype to product.

Check out John Teel’s Top 25 Websites, Tools and Resources for Hardware Startups.

Read More