PCB Calculators

While designing PCBs there are a lot of parameters one needs to account for. That’s where standalone calculators(and some online ones) really shine. One of the best ones out there in the freeware domain is PCB Toolkit by SaturnPCB. I have been using this for years now. It’s a stunning bit of software which contains so many calculators rolled into one. You have an impedance calculator for figuring out the width of trace in PCB for the desired impedance profile, you have a differential pair calculator to fine-tune your target impedances for differential high-speed traces. Via & Current rating calculators to size out your current tracks based on thermal and current carrying capabilities. Beyond that, they have lots of smaller measurements which makes it a one-stop option rather than Googling each time. Try it out, there are too many to explain in detail.

How accurate are these calculators? There are usually able to give you a near good enough value as it’s mostly coded up based on equations. You will see definitely slight variations in real life. It won’t probably give the accuracy of very expensive simulators out there but it’s good enough.

BTW KICAD PCB software also has a few built-in PCB calculators, it’s not that extensive though.

Would love to hear about any other PCB/EE calculators that you use in your workflow.

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Rant: The EV number plate design

I have been driving around and I keep finding this very irksome. The electric vehicle number plate colour choice in India is plain ridiculous in my opinion. For those in my network who don’t know what I am talking about, the number plates for EVs in the Indian market is now designed with a full-length light green background with a pure white text colour for the actual numbers. The white text colour is for private vehicles and it gets replaced by yellow text for commercial vehicles. For normal petrol/diesel private vehicles, it’s pure black text on a white background.

What’s my problem with EV number plates? There is very little contrast in the colour of white and a light green background. It’s pretty hard to distinguish or read out colours because of the lack of contrast esp. at night. Now add to the case that, if your vehicle headlights shine a bright light directly on an EV’s back number plate, the light green kinda shines bright and makes the contrast to read out the white text even harder. This becomes practically worse for a commercial vehicle with yellow text and light green background with minimal contrast. To add to this, contrast is affected more by the fact of littering of the word IND across the text in pure black which makes it the absolute worst colour choice since it reduces the reflection of the white text. All of this becomes problematic when you try to read a number plate in an emergency scenario.

I personally cannot think of any reason why govt would roll out this colour scheme without looking into these aspects. A simple way they can fix this is by increasing the darkness of the green so that there is enough contrast. There are 10s of shades in each colour, pick a pair which can give maximum contrast. There are enough colour contrast checkers available online for free to test this.

Am I the only person to be disturbed by this? Am I missing something obvious which govt thought of? I really would love your opinions on this one.

PS: It’s a deviation from my usual posts. But I had to put this out there. Sorry for the not-so-great photo, Took it while driving.

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