I saw today a news item that captured my interest.  BatchPCB, a PCB  prototyping company is offering a new service that allows you to place your PCB designs into the public domain.  This is a new and interesting way to share designs with other interested electronics builders.

I am a fully signed up convert to RSS feeds.  In case you are not aware of hot to use RSS feeds, have a look in your browsers address bar…  See an orange logo?     If you click on this is will allow you to save the RSS feed for the site you are in.  You can try it out now with www.justblair.co.uk if you like.

Personally I use “Google Reader” to manage and browse my RSS feeds.  in the morning I log into my Google account and catch up on the feeds much in the way that a non-geek may read the daily paper.  Best thing about it is that you don’t tend to miss out on stories that interest you.  Today a news item from Sparkfun caught my interest.

Sparkfun, if you haven’t heard of them already is a company that sells all manner of electronics project kits, catering for the amateur builders.  For slightly unusual kits, sparkfun is one of the few places available on the internet.  BatchPCB is a spinoff company from Sparkfun that provides  a PCB prototyping service.

BatchPCB I learned today have been working on their website to improve the service that they are offering to customers.  The basic premise to their service is that they have automated the process of submitting PCB designs.  What they label their DRC bot (Design Rules Checker) will examine your submitted Gerber files looking for basic mistakes.  Once checked, your design is loaded onto a PCB board template alongside other customers designs.  For a one off prototype this sharing of the boards saves money on the build.  BatchPCB are candid enough about their lead times.  Obviously when you order your design is cued and waits for other customers designs to fill the sheet.

Whilst it’s nice to have another bookmark for PCB manufacture, what really caught my  eye about BatchPCB’s newly redesigned site is a new feature which allows you to place your pcb design on the Batch PCB site for the public to order.  If you are the sharing type, this altruistic act may give you a cosy glow.  Basically you can opt to make your design available and others may order the board as a one off order.  I can see this as being an interesting idea for hobbyists who are collaborating on designs say through forums such as DIYaudio and similar.  Obviously your handing over your pride and joy to the public domain.

From BatchPCB’s point of view the advantages are obvious.  If you want to benefit from someone else’s design talent, the path of least resistance is to use their service.   However, even with the longish lead times for getting your board made, consider how long a group buy takes to organise.  With BatchPCB, the design is already verified and loaded onto the site.  No waiting around for others to join in the group buy.

BatchPCB is a growing but still small scale company.  Erik and Devlin are basically it for now.  It is admirable that there is someone out there catering for the small production runs.  Erik was telling me that they have some other innovative site features in the pipeline just now, so keep an eye on their site for  future announcements.

No I am not lonely… well not that lonely anyway.  The reason that I ask is that I received a message from a friend to say that he had tried to contact me via the site. Unfortunately the mail did not get through to me.  I am hoping that this is a one off!

Unfortunately in these days of bountiful spam, publishing an e-mail address just screams “I NEED V1A6RA” from the rooftops and many thousands of helpful souls will endeavour to help how they can.  So what I am doing is this.

I am opening a forum page for lost comments, or alternately if you have been trying to contact me and I have not got back to you, please leave a comment here.  Of course if you do have V1A6RA too sell, can I possibly suggest spamming someone else.. I’ve got plenty thanks!

Bye for now

The World Wide Web has made the sharing of information easier, more convenient and more rapid than ever before.  It’s not without it’s flaws though the main one being just the huge wealth of sites to peruse, remember and revisit.  It makes it easy for a product to go astray and last week I discovered such a product.

On a recent browse of the Internet as I tend to do, I came across an interesting yet simple project that interested me.  It is on a blog named desireableaudio,  a communal blog with several members. Panzer would appear to be the author of this item.

Now the subject of cable burn in is a contentious one.  The idea is that audio cables change their properties after use in their current location.  Manufacturers of high end cable will quite often recommend some burn in time before evaluating their cables.  Now if only there was a quick way of doing this?

YC, over on his blog Finetone - An Audio Odyssey has released pictures of his latest project, a passive preamplifier.  Passive?  Are pre-amps not meant to be active devices?

YC doesn't think so, and even though details are not yet complete about the design of his build, he gives some persuasive reasoning as to his choice to go passive with this pre-amp.

His design he mentions is based on the Audio Synthesis Passion, externally the first images he has released bear a close resemblance with a neat black anodised case and gold detailing.

Internally he description belies the attention to detail that he has bestowed on this pre-amp using the similar ingredients to the Audio Synthesis.  High quality wiring, a stepped attenuator and more.

Go Visit his blog to find out more about what is a simple, yet clearly well considered design.

Hi all

I have been very busy working on the site over the last couple of weeks.  One or two changes to the appearance of the site have been the result.  I hope that you like the Tag cloud that has appeared in the top left hand corner.  I am still making my mind up whether I am happy with its final resting place, however I am planning to run with it for a week or so to see if it gets used.  Comments on it are very welcome.

Other differences you may not have noticed, they are more in the back end of the site.  Last Sunday I had the Hard drive silencing article featured on the front page of www.slashdot.organd the traffic volume shot up.  Its a slightly surreal experience sitting in your pyjamas, hangover raging, watching the visits to your site rise from 150 visits per day up to several hundred visits every minute.  Needless to say, the "curse of slashdot" befell the site after a few hours and my service provider's servers shut down the site.  It took a coupe of days of e-mails backwards and forwards to get the site back on its feet. 

Needless to say I have had to learn some emergency coding.  I wanted to be ready if the site gets traffic of this magnitude again.  I think that I am now as ready as I can be should the traffic levels peak like this again.  I have placed some code that should distribute the site traffic to a mirror network when the server is under pressure.

All this new learning has eaten into my project time recently.  Fortunately Aleš Mravlak has been busy, submitting an interesting and informative article about the Sure Tripath TA2024 evaluation board that he bought from Arjen Helder in china.  He has modified the board extensively.  Impressive work I think that you will agree.

Another author to submit recently was Robert Powell who contributed an article on his succession of Gainclone Amplifiers.  I especially like the bread bin that he adapted as a case.  Very imaginative.  Check out also his obscure sugar puff reference.  I bet you go "Eh?  Oh yeaaaaaah...  How true"

So there we are, a busy couple of weeks for the site and for me.  Frusrating slightly that i have not managed to pick up a slodering iron for a while, but gratifying also to have received so many visits recently.  I hope that I can continue to supply content that interests so many readers, both from my own project box and also from the project boxes of other hobbyists,  I am sure we all agree that Aleš and Robert have made interesting and valuable contributions!