Ground Plane Jumps the Fence

Just lost my ground plane on this final version of the serial squid. As the PCB outline is complex, I followed the advice of some other KiCAD users, and just let the PCB edge naturally truncate the copper pours on the ground and power planes. This worked well until today, when suddenly the ground plane decided to jump the fence, so to speak.

[Read More]

Placement, Second Time Around

As I predicted, I didn’t like the first attempt at parts placement. Conceptually, it seemed ideal to put the parts for each appendage at the corresponding angle. However, there are some problems with this in practice. As best as I can tell, being a novice at KiCAD, routing a bunch of parts at odd angles was going to be a headache. But mainly, it just looked ugly. Maybe if there were 8 identical arms I would have thought differently. But I decided to toss the angled layout and go with a more traditional placement where parts are lined up either vertically or horizontally, that is, 90 degree angles all around. The only exception being the edge connectors themselves.

[Read More]

Serial Squid Parts Placement First Draft

I finished the first draft of the Serial Squid PCB parts layout today. It has been an adventure learning KiCAD’s PCBNew tool, and fighting with the circular layout and angles of this board. That will be the subject of a future post.

[Read More]

Pain in the NAS

As part of my ongoing effort to better organize my digital data, I’ve been using a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device for the past couple of years. A NAS is a standalone hard disk connected to your local network by Ethernet. They typically contain multiple disk drives configured in a RAID array. In my case, I have the Buffalo LinkStation Duo, model LS-WXL 682. It came from the factory outfitted with two each one terabyte hard disk drives, pre-configured as a RAID-0 array. Initially I didn’t fully grasp the subtle implications of it being RAID-0. I knew I wasn’t getting any error correction benefit, but in the back of my mind I was planning to eventually change out the drives with larger ones. I would reconfigure to RAID-1 at that point1. That time came last week. The delivery man tossed two brand new, four terabyte disk drives five meters over my front fence onto my doorstep. This can only be explained as a final on-site qualification drop test, carefully planned in advance by the manufacturer’s QA department to instill confidence in the buyer.

  1. My NAS has only two drive bays, so other RAID configurations aren’t possible. 

[Read More]

Compulsive Cell Phone Battery Management

A few years ago, I forgot my spare cell phone battery on a trip to Hong Kong, and I hastily purchased one at the airport. When I returned home, I soon realized that with three identical batteries, it was hard to keep a steady rotation of even usage. Furthermore, while out and about with two fresh batteries in my bag, once I swapped batteries it was hard to determine which battery was drained and which was fresh. Although this trivial problem won’t bother most people outside of engineers and OCD patients, I offer the following low-cost solution.

[Read More]