About Author

David Bortolami

David Bortolami is electronic engineer with a broad knowledge in PCB and circuit design. Currently, he is the head of Fermium, a small British enterprise that manufactures some of the world's most advanced scientific instruments for teaching and research.

"Every product can be made twice as good at half the cost; it's a matter of diving deeply into why it should exist - then taking the rest out."

As an Entrepreneur, David has experience with all the hurdles of manufacturing, integrated electronic-mechanical product design, meeting EMC & Regulatory requirements. In the past, he ran one of the biggest Italian Fablab/Hackerspace and Coworkings and was in charge of PCB Engineering for companies specialised in EMI-heavy industries such as electronic inverters.

You can contact David directly at: d@fermium.ltd.uk

Most Recent Posts

From RC to Atomic Clocks: All Clock Sources In almost modern circuits, especially whenever digital circuitry is involved, you will find some kind of clock source. All clock sources present a series of tradeoffs regarding stability, reliability, size, power consumption and cost. Luckily for us, such tradeoffs are relatively simple and can be explained almost fully within this single article. We’ll discuss the pros and cons of each clock source, from the RC in a 555-powered oscillator, to a Read Article

What They do not Teach you About Capacitors In engineering, we often adopt hundreds of mental shortcuts in order to keep the complexity of the topics we tackle to a manageable level. If we were to run a quantum-physics simulation every time we flash an LED, we would never get anything done. Yet, many of these shortcuts and rules-of-thumb were created in times past , when the electronics industry was radically different than what it is now. Today, we are going to unlearn what a capacitor is Read Article

What They Don’t Teach You About Fluxes Introduction As engineers, we sometimes sit high on our pillowy chairs, looking at the nitty and gritty of the industry — such as the fabrication of the PCB — with a bit of nonchalance. The truth of the matter is, when studied in-depth, PCB fabrication is an extremely complex technological topic that deserves recognition as the most fundamental part of PCB engineering. Unless connectors, conductive adhesive, wire-bonding, or zebra-tape are used Read Article

Best DC Laboratory Bench Power Supplies of 2021 A guide to power supplies, related requirements, technological tradeoffs, and recommended brands and models. Read Article

Huge Vu-meter with RGB LEDs Project A laboratory journal to guide you through the steps to develop a successful product that value-conscious customers are sure to love. Read Article

Using the iPad Pro for Electronic Design Altium Concord Pro® on Altium 365 was updated with a smoother, more feature-full and more intuitive interface for the web design viewer. I want to use this occasion to share with you some of my favourite apps and websites for electronic design. Read Article

3D Printing PCBs and Generating Printing Models Altium Designer® offers a fully integrated environment for generating instructions for 3D printing PCBs. Use the MCAD/ECAD collaboration tools in Altium Designer for PCB design and integration with mechanical design tools. Read Article

Your Office Network is Not Secure Introduction A few years back, I was among the leaders in one of Italy’s biggest Hackerspaces. There was an unearthly atmosphere when a place meant to bring all sorts of folks together opened its doors for the first time. It reminded me of the internet-famous band 2Cellos. Their music is a mixture of classic, pop and metal covers, played on cellos with varying levels of distortion. They can swiftly escalate from harmonies of long-held soothing Read Article

Perfect Boards Every Time (With Free Templates) Gone are the days of obsessing over the formatting of schematics. Draftsman®, embedded within Altium Designer®, could radically change your workflow for the better. Read Article

CAN-Bus: Designing CAN-Bus Circuitry This article is part of a three-part introductory series on the CAN-bus: Part 1: An Informal Introduction Part 2: The Protocol Part 3: Designing CAN-Bus Circuitry Introduction There are three main components in a CAN-bus node: Microprocessor CAN-bus controller CAN-bus transceiver The CAN-bus controller implements all the low-level features of the network protocol, ISO 11898–1, while the transceiver communicates with the physical layer. Different Read Article