Circuit Break Podcast #349

Connector Catalogs

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October 23, 2022, Episode #349

This is the last installment of Stephen's 'Adventures in Injection Molding'. We are going to recap the entire two year sage and close the book on it.

November 5, 2022 – Extra Life

  • Haven’t had a chance to work on this yet
  • Going to stream working on it?

Adventures in injection molding

  • PINNACLE 5112C3
  • 8% haze – this is pretty low. Any lower and it would be considered “clear”
  • Low melt flow, excellent processability – Voids
  • Two ways to create diffusion
    • Haze
    • Surface Texture

Jeep Prop Fan 

  • Half bridges for each output
  • Current sensing
    • INA219
  • Inputs
    • Found a product that will do the thermocouples on canbus
    • Instead of that crazy LTC2986 chip
      • Just expose an ADC 0-5V 
  • Connectors are the hardest part of this project so far
    • Dictate the entire specifications

RFAB2 Lab – an expansion of the RFAB1 Lab

  • Sept. 29, TI announcedt began initial chip production at RFAB2, a new 300-mm analog wafer lab in Richardson, TX
  • 300 analog fab
    • digital isolator
    • Ethernet transceiver
    • brushless DC motor driver
    • digital-to-analog converter
  • 100M units/day within a few years

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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