MWMaggie Wanginanypcba.hashnode.dev·Jun 2 · 8 min readPCB Thermal Gradient and Thermal Stress Design: Preventing Solder Joint Cracking and Via FailureHave you ever experienced a product that passed functional tests but failed after thermal cycling, or developed intermittent failures after months in the field? Opening the enclosure reveals cracked s00
MWMaggie Wanginanypcba.hashnode.dev·May 20 · 5 min readPCB Thermal Management Basics – Don’t Let Your Boards OverheatYour circuit board works fine in the lab, but in the field it resets randomly, performance degrades, or components burn out. The culprit is often heat. As power density increases, thermal management i00
MWMaggie Wanginanypcba.hashnode.dev·May 15 · 8 min readThe Complete Guide to PCB Vias: Through‑Hole, Blind, Buried, and Microvias If you‘ve ever looked closely at a multi‑layer PCB, you’ve noticed the small copper‑plated holes. Those are vias. They might look simple, but choosing the wrong type or size can hurt your signal integ00
MMacaulay001inforgottentheorieshashnodedev.hashnode.dev·May 11 · 7 min readI fit V = I R to four devices on the same voltage sweep. Only one of them stayed linear.Part 65 of Forgotten Theories, a series re-testing old scientific claims with modern tools. Find the rest under the #forgotten-theories tag. Georg Ohm published Die galvanische Kette, mathematisch bearbeitet in Berlin in 1827. The book argued that c...00
AKAbijah Kajabikainblog.abijah.me·May 9 · 9 min readTeaching a Small LLM to Design Electronic Circuits: Fine-Tuning Qwen3-4B on 100K KiCad NetlistsHow I built a 100K-example dataset of executable circuit netlists and fine-tuned a 4B parameter model that scores 88% on functional circuit generation, rivaling GPT-4o's published benchmarks. The Pro10
MWMaggie Wanginanypcba.hashnode.dev·May 6 · 7 min readPCB Panelization – Why Your Small Board Is Costing You More Than It Should Introduction You‘re ordering 100 small PCBs. The quote comes back, and the per-board price seems high — much higher than what you’d expect for such a tiny board. What‘s going on? The answer is often p00
Xx-originating-ipinx-originating-ip.hashnode.dev·Apr 30 · 8 min readBuilding 'nandtap': Dumping a Cisco Meraki Z1 NAND via Raspberry Pi GPIO Without Removing Chip from BoardTL;DR: https://github.com/x-originating-ip/nandtap As part of some personal upskilling, I wanted to get a better feel for what edge-device forensics actually looks like in practice. It’s one of those 10
MWMaggie Wanginanypcba.hashnode.dev·Apr 30 · 7 min readSurface Mount Technology (SMT) Explained – How Modern Electronics Are BuiltIntroduction Open up any smartphone, laptop, or smartwatch. What do you see? Tiny components — resistors smaller than a grain of rice, chips with dozens of pins — all sitting flat on the board. That's00
Nnithishatninaines.hashnode.dev·Apr 13 · 4 min readThe Pipeline ProblemThe architecture of modern processors has evolved over decades. Modern CPUs are still influenced by the basic architectural principles introduced by early microprocessors such as the 8085 and 8086. Pi00
TZTasbiha Zamanintrailobot.hashnode.dev·Apr 8 · 6 min readSetting up PWM on STM32F4 for servo control — a practical guideI spent a good chunk of time staring at three register names — ARR, PSC, CCR — with no real idea what they meant or how they connected to the PWM signal I needed to generate. The STM32 documentation i00