Seriously, Make Your Own Symbols & Footprints
In this post, I’ll highlight the two main problems with using premade symbols and footprints - whether they come from built-in software libraries (like those in Altium Vault or KiCad) or are downloaded from the internet. While it might seem like a time-saver, it’s often much more reliable to create your own. Most datasheets provide detailed and accurate information to help you build correct symbols and footprints with minimal effort.
If you still choose to use premade components, make sure to thoroughly review every symbol and footprint yourself. A quick check now can save you days of debugging and a lot of wasted time and money down the line.
FFT with Python
In this post, I’ll cover the basics of creating and plotting a discrete-time signal. Next, we will find its frequency spectrum using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT). Finally, we’ll explore an unfortunate effect called spectral leakage and see how windowing can help reduce it. This will be a hands-on, applied discussion, showing how to do all of this using Python.
Using Spyder with Python Virtual Environment
In this post, I’ll walk you through how I set up my Spyder IDE to use a Python virtual environment and enable interactive plots with ipympl.
Spyder is a great IDE for scientific and engineering applications in Python - especially if you're coming from a Matlab background. Its interface closely resembles Matlab, making it easier to work with arrays, matrices, and plots compared to something like Visual Studio Code. This is particularly helpful when analyzing data during debugging or after your code runs.