Dave gives his first impression of Altium's new FREE PCB design tool for the maker community, Circuit Maker. What are the limitations? What do you get? http://www.circuitmaker.com/ Forum: http://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-754-altium-circuit-maker-first-impressions/ Altium Entry Level PCB Tool Rant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GjBFQgVWv0 EEVblog Main Web Site: http://www.eevblog.com The 2nd EEVblog Channel: http://www.youtube.com/EEVblog2 Support the EEVblog through Patreon! http://www.patreon.com/eevblog EEVblog Amazon Store (Dave gets a cut): http://astore.amazon.com/eevblogstore-20 T-Shirts: http://teespring.com/stores/eevblog Donations: http://www.eevblog.com/donations/ Projects: http://www.eevblog.com/projects/ Electronics Info Wiki: http://www.eevblog.com/wiki/

Another movie length Mailbag. What have people sent in this week? Forum: http://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-735-mailbag/ SPOILERS: Why are cheap Ebay LED light bulbs so bad? Dave investigates why some of them are doomed to fail. DaveCAD and thermal camera time. http://www.qt-brightek.com/datasheet/QBLP679E-IWK-XX.pdf CPM700 Countersurveillance unit from Research Electronics Inc for cold war spy bug sweeping. Cheap Ebay voltage sources for multimeter calibration Raspberry Pi I/O Hat Kickstarter, the Hatilogico: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jelby/hatalogico-for-the-raspberry-pi Industrial RS232 modem teardown Bricked Assus TF300 Transformer Tablet Annoy-a-tron Belkin router teardown Cypress Parachute Automatic Activation Device. Previous video teardown on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-wzPTiLz5c EEVblog Main Web Site: http://www.eevblog.com The 2nd EEVblog Channel: http://www.youtube.com/EEVblog2 Support the EEVblog through Patreon! http://www.patreon.com/eevblog EEVblog Amazon Store (Dave gets a cut): http://astore.amazon.com/eevblogstore-20 Donations: http://www.eevblog.com/donations/ Projects: http://www.eevblog.com/projects/ Electronics Info Wiki: http://www.eevblog.com/wiki/

Dave explains, shows, and measures a potentially big trap with using high value ceramic capacitors. Is your 10uF capacitor really 10uF in your circuit? You might be shocked! Those humble X7R caps you think are a "stable" dielectric? think again... Class II and above ceramic capacitors can vary their capacitance drastically with DC bias voltage level and also the applied AC voltage. Links: http://www.murataamericas.com/murata/murata.nsf/promo_dcbias.pdf http://www.avx.com/docs/masterpubs/mccc.pdf http://www.ece.ucdavis.edu/vcl/asap/asap_v1/docs/X7R_C.pdf http://psearch.murata.com/capacitor/product/GRM21BR60J106KE19%23.html http://www.murata.com/products/design_support/simsurfing/outline.html http://www.avx.com/SpiApps Capacitor Tutorial - Ceramics & Impedance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDDoi70cxw0 The piezoelectric effect demonstrated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFCRB4d991E Forum: http://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-626-ceramic-capacitor-voltage-dependency-download/ EEVblog Main Web Site: http://www.eevblog.com EEVblog Amazon Store: http://astore.amazon.com/eevblogstore-20 Donations: http://www.eevblog.com/donations/ Projects: http://www.eevblog.com/projects/ Electronics Info Wiki: http://www.eevblog.com/wiki/

2011 was a big year for the blog... (Sorry for the video quality, I tried to use Youtubes video stabiliser and now it won't let me revert back to my original video! - Another Youtube FAIL)