#718 – Layout Review with Zachariah Peterson

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released March 11th, 2026. Episode 718. Layout Review with Zachariah Peterson.

Chris Gammell: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Zachariah Peterson: Hello, everyone. I am Zach Peterson. Very happy to be here. You may know me as the founder of Northwest Engineering Solutions, and you probably also know me as that guy in the Altium videos. So I'm also Altium's technical consultant.

Chris Gammell: Welcome, Zach. How are you doing?

Zachariah Peterson: I'm doing great. Thank you for having me. This is really cool because I'm usually in the host seat. I'm not often in the guest seat. So anytime I get a chance to be in the guest seat, I think it's really special. So thank you very much for having me.

Chris Gammell: Have you just been sitting there since 2021 when you started on the podcast and doing all this stuff as well? And you're just like, I wish someone, why hasn't anyone asked me about me?

Zachariah Peterson: Well, I sometimes get a question about me on a podcast episode, but I try not to be a self-promoter. You know what I mean? Because you're doing a job, right? You're trying to find out something interesting about somebody else. So I like to do that part of it.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's great. And so you've been doing the podcast since 2021. You do lots of design reviews, which is kind of how you caught my eye doing all the, I see them often on LinkedIn and things like that. What are some of the other spaces around like your all-time expertise that people might see you?

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned videos on YouTube. I'm very happy to be doing a lot of video content on Altium's YouTube channel. Again, also since 2021. So it's been a long time. There's been so many opportunities that have come from that to be on other podcasts and to go overseas and do some overseas seminars each year. So there's a company overseas in Denmark called Azatec that has been bringing me out to do high-speed design and signal integrity seminars, which has been really great. I think this past year in 2025 was my third or fourth year. I've lost count of the number of times I've gone out. They brought me out there so much. So I often post about that on LinkedIn when those come up. I've started working with Dental Flux over the past year, working with them on their EMC content, their EMC strategy. Other places you'll see me aside from YouTube is, I mean, of course, the Altium blog. I've been working with Altium since end of 2017. And that's really where I got started with them was working on their technical content. And then I also do a lot of conferences each year. So PCB West, PCB East. I'm not doing PCB East this year, but next year I'll be there in their new venue. ED Icon, I do probably every other year. And then there's usually one other kind of, you know, online thing that I do, maybe a webinar for an organization, you know, PCB Africa. Every so often I'll do one with them. And Dental Flux likes to have me do, you know, one or two webinars a year. So yeah, I get out there quite a bit online for webinars and seminars.

Chris Gammell: Well, I mean, I'd love to just kind of, you know, tap your expertise around. One, I think, you know, I view you as a Altium super user type person, right? Obviously, you know, the platform super well, but really just even because you're broader than just the Altium stuff, like the state of the industry, right? Obviously, there's a ton of AI tools, you know, and so-so on that. But, you know, they're coming. But really just where you see trends going, where you see the needs for people who are working on PCBs and in the variety of forms. And, you know, where I think a lot of listeners would be interested in where they should be looking to improve their own education and future knowledge that they're not getting left behind.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah, definitely. I guess we could jump into any one of those, right? Because they all follow kind of slightly different threads.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, let's start with Altium stuff. I mean, like there have been some changes at Altium, you know about those. We've talked about a little bit, but Dave and I are know nothings. So we're just like, oh, yeah, some changes happened. So high level, like Altium changes, maybe that would be a good place to start.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah, yeah. So obviously, you know, there was an acquisition by Renesys that came about. And listen, I preface this by saying-

Chris Gammell: Yeah, you're not Altium. We should be. Yeah.

Zachariah Peterson: I am not in on any of the C-suite conversations, right? So- Right, right. You know, I know what gets told to me. And then pretty shortly after it gets told to me, it gets told to the general public. So I'm more the encyclopedia of all the messaging. So I can kind of tell you the order of events, but it's all public information that I'm going to share here. So if you haven't heard it, you can get it here first, I guess. So yeah, there was the acquisition by Renesys. And I think that kind of grew out of Altium's really deep foray into, you know, more enterprise level services or SaaS, I guess you could say. You know, Altium 365 was a big enabler of that. And the way it was originally described, and we actually used this term in marketing material several years ago, was that it was supposed to be like Google Docs for PCB design, right? Yeah. That's right. Yeah. And you can, you know, open stuff directly inside Altium Designer and share stuff and, you know, create your own kind of teams. And, you know, it's a really cool concept. And Altium kind of brings that to the mid-market, because if you were going to do that previously, you would have to have a massively expensive license, like from Siemens. I mean, I don't know if you've ever gotten a quote for a Siemens product, but house, Siemens product, right? Like those are your options, right?

Chris Gammell: Right. I think I've never bothered because like, why would I? And also, yeah, well, everybody knows I'm bought and paid for. Right, right.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. So, you know, they're bringing this solution to the mid-market, which I think is a great thing. And, you know, there's been a lot of chatter on social media and on Reddit about, you know, hey, you know, the user base wants more features, though. Like not all of us are enterprise users, which, you know, that's fair, right? There's a lot of new enterprise features like the workflow management and requirements. And, you know, I don't use workflow management. You know, kind of the list goes on, right? Jira integration, like I don't use Jira, right? Big companies use Jira, you know? So, I think if you think about it from a business perspective, like where they're trying to go makes sense. And I think it helped to enable the acquisition by Renesys. And kind of the message that I got from Lawrence Romine when I talked with him at PCB West and, you know, we did a podcast interview with him and, you know, put it out on YouTube is, you know, they want to come back home and refocus on the user. So, you know, of course, I'm supposed to be the Altium fanboy. I'm supposed to tell you Altium is great and everything. But I'm telling you what they've told me is that, you know, they hear you, they want to refocus on the user, and things are really moving back in that direction. You know, it's been a while, I think, since there's been like monumental PCB layout features that have been released in Altium Designer. You know, like I said, a lot of it's been enterprise level stuff. So, don't be surprised when they come out with some cool new PCB layout features. And again, I'm not in on the C-suite level conversations or the product level conversations. I don't know what those are going to be. But I can tell you for sure that it's been said to me by many people, and it's been said publicly that, you know, they definitely want to refocus on the user.

Chris Gammell: That's great. I kind of see all CAD programs, you know, as an outsider, again, we've all been kind of bolstered by like these features that have been in the common mind, right? Like just a lot of the tools that maybe were even pioneered by the big tool vendors, but those come to open source tooling as well. And so, it's kind of like the rising tide that we've all seen. And so, then what is left past that is the, okay, now you're in a bigger team, make that easier. Okay, now you're faster workflow, more efficient, moving into production, things like the struggles you might see as you move into like manufacturing and all the interfacing with part buying, like all the kind of everything else that we don't think of dragging a trace across the board, the trace across the board has mostly been figured out many times over. Great. So, then the everything else is very useful, I think.

Zachariah Peterson: Well, again, think about it from a business perspective, right? They need to grow as a company at some level because, you know, they have financial backers and investors and, you know, people they have to answer to. So, you know, when you've kind of dominated the mid-market, which was really the case and, you know, up to the 2020 period, like where are you going to grow into? Well, now you've got to displace the legacy platforms out of the enterprise market. So, that's where a lot of the development focus goes. So, you know, it makes sense from a business perspective. And, you know, like I said, don't be surprised if they come back and start focusing on the user because they've kind of been demolishing the legacy platforms when it comes to the enterprise market.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And one thing that I've seen, there have been like pricing changes as well, where for the, you know, kind of the everyday use of the consultant, that sort of thing, it does seem like those prices have dropped as well, which has been a good change. I'm not sure it's been, at least in my circles, it's not been like super well circulated, but I've talked to other people and they're like, yeah, no, it's cheaper now. Like that's, that alone is like, okay, you know, so that's, that's not nothing, you know?

Zachariah Peterson: I think it matters, right? Because first things first, you should use the tool that works for you. Okay. First things first, right? If you're a student, you're a hobbyist and it doesn't make sense for you to fork out however many thousands per year for, for a CAD tool, then don't, you know, no one's putting the weapon to your head, forcing you to do it. You shouldn't do it. But when you're running a business, when you're a consultant, when you want to be a freelancer, you know, when, when you want to be in that position and, and you want to really like do this as a career, you have a real big impetus to actually like at least learn the paid software. Right. And if you get into a position where, okay, you know, I actually have some, some real business opportunities, the ROI for paid software speaks for itself, you know? So for them to, to drop the price a little bit for that group of people, um, and it just increases your, your return on investment as a, as a freelancer or as a consultant.

Chris Gammell: Personally, I never, never took that leap. It'd be interesting if I ever get back in the consulting game, that it would be, you know, like that pressure for it. Right. It really is. It kind of comes down to like your client types as well. Right. If I'm going after jobs, it's layout only. It's almost certainly going to be, you know, large scale, Altium, Siemens, other, other big iron style tools. Cause it's like, yeah, we already do this in house. You do our tool. But if it's like, I'm prototyping for someone new, I can be like, oh, it's going to be key kit.

Zachariah Peterson: And that's, you know, that's totally fair. I mean, you got to think about what does the client want? If the client is demanding a specific piece of software, the only way you get the job is if you have the software, you know?

Chris Gammell: Well, that was, there's a very good overview. So now say a young, younger engineer is listening and they're, they're looking at you and like, Zach, what, where should I be going? Aside from maybe learning Altium or other, you know, paid tools, like you said, what should they be learning? What, what are trends that you see that people should be digging into and, you know, building their own skill sets?

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah, this is a really great question. So the things you should be learning are not often taught in university or some universities teach them better than others. So I'll just preface that. However, the corporate world has been doing a great job over the past approximately a decade of stepping up and realizing that if they want to have a customer base for their products, they need to do new customer education or new engineer education. So the, the number of resources for people who want to learn some of this stuff has only been going up and I expect it to keep going up. And that's, you know, half of the reason I even have a career, right? So there's a few things. I think the first big one is EMC. Okay. And you don't have to necessarily learn how to build a test lab. You don't have to learn all the ins and outs of running tests. You don't have to memorize standards, but like just really basic EMC 101.

Chris Gammell: Physics. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Understanding mental models of how electricity moves.

Zachariah Peterson: Exactly. Yeah. Some, some really basic stuff about, about EMC and some, some context around design guidelines that are claimed to be for EMC. Yes.

Chris Gammell: Contextual electronics. I hear you. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Contextually.

Zachariah Peterson: I was waiting for that. That's a big one. That's a really big one. You know, we already have kind of a talent issue in our industry, especially in the U S and Europe and EMC has it even worse than, than just the regular old designer.

Chris Gammell: You see people being like, Oh, I wish you'd teach more people about X because we can't find anyone who knows about EMC or whatever.

Zachariah Peterson: Well, I just look at the range of people who practice EMC as a pure discipline. And I look at their age distribution and the age distribution tells you everything you need to know when you get some of the, the well-known people who have retired and then they put big quotation marks around retirement. You know, it's because they've been continuously asked to come back in and deal with EMC issues.

Chris Gammell: Call for price. That's what they really say.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah, exactly. Because there's so much demand for the talent. It's, it's still needed. So I would say, learn something about EMC at the very minimum. It's going to help make you more valuable in your position. Also, I think it's such a core thing to learn. If you want to transition out of just doing hobby stuff or doing, you know, contrived examples to building actual products, stuff that actually gets manufactured in large volumes and put out there into market. So I think that's a really big one.

Chris Gammell: That's great. Yeah. So you, you do some training around that. You do some resources around that. What, where do you usually point people then?

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. So I normally point people to some publications and then, you know, we try to touch on it with Altium. I've had some EMC experts on recently on the podcast. So we had Todd Hubing and then we had Karen Burnham just recently, both excellent, excellent episodes, if I do say so. And not because I did anything special, but because they're awesome. So I'd say that. Yeah. Yeah. Not trying to promote myself here, but we did, we did have them on the podcast recently. So, you know, follow the right people. They will give you little tidbits. They put their resources online. There are really excellent resources there that you can learn from. Dental Flux has really done a great job of taking the lead of trying to put out good EMC resources that are well contextualized and getting experts on to give webinars and trainings, that kind of thing. Like I said, we do it through Altium a little bit. And then the publications that I normally point to are interference technology. Just fair warning, I do sit on the editorial board for that publication. And then there's also In Compliance Magazine. So all really great ones. Signal Integrity Journal, every so often puts out some articles that touch on EMI, EMC a little bit. Also a really great resource. So yeah, that's, I think those are the first places I would start. I think the places I would avoid for EMI, EMC are semiconductor application notes and data sheets.

Chris Gammell: Because what?

Zachariah Peterson: I have spoken with several folks about this. And I spoke with Todd Heuming and Karen Burnham about this. Todd Heuming actually has a presentation that he gives, which is like the worst of the worst EMC guidance from data sheets. And he will show data sheets timestamped very recently, like within the past couple of years, that give bad guidance, which is going to make you more likely to fail EMC. There are actual experts that look at this and review it. But unfortunately, the semiconductor companies don't like to listen very much or they don't notice. And so unfortunately, the bad guidance just kind of gets copied and pasted over the years between data sheets. And Kevin Coates, who I also had on the Altium podcast, he also said recently in a comment in a video that we just put out about PCB guidance in data sheets that, yeah, they just kind of copy and pasted because it worked in the 90s or it worked in the 80s. And no one ever bothered to do really rigorous testing on some of the evaluation products that they produce. And so it just ends up being copy pasted and no one ever checks it.

Chris Gammell: So then cover the converse of this. So people who don't heed your advice, you're saying that these are going to be the people who are weeping in the corner of the test lab, being like, I failed again, that sort of thing like EMI testing, going into, you know, getting certified, going to production, that sort of thing.

Zachariah Peterson: I'm not necessarily saying that, right? I guess what I'm saying is...

Chris Gammell: What are the consequences? I mean, like, I mean, just as the converse, right? Like the counter example.

Zachariah Peterson: Sure, sure. I think there's a few different examples, right? Like if you're working as a startup and you're the founding engineer, right? Or you're one of the early engineers and you're on a team that doesn't fully understand EMC. I mean, we're talking about, you know, wasted testing runs here, okay? And not being sure how to do the quick fix in the lab in order to get through testing, right? Sometimes the quick fix is exactly what you needed, product passes, and then you're able to go to market. Sometimes there is no quick fix that works and then it's back to the drawing board.

Chris Gammell: And that's you. Yeah. So basically that translates back to money and just runway and all that kind of thing, right? Yeah, exactly.

Zachariah Peterson: And I've dealt with companies that have gone through EMC testing, failed. They couldn't figure out a quick fix. Typically what happens at that point is they do their first spin, they fail. Then they do another spin because they did some sort of little modification. They can't even pass pre-compliance. And then it comes to someone like me, right? So then they'll come to someone like me and they'll say, you know, we did some research and we found this list of like 10 things that are supposed to like solve EMC problems. Can you please just do these 10 things? And they're pretty sure one of those 10 things will solve the problem. So then they're on another prototype spin and then they're going to go into pre-compliance again. And then maybe they'll get into another round of formal testing. Fingers crossed. You can already count up the tens of thousands of dollars that they've spent just on the board runs and the testing, right? Forget about people's salaries, you know? Right. Of course. Of course.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's wild.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. Well, this has happened to me multiple times.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, right, right. This is some experience.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah, exactly.

Chris Gammell: How, I guess, how are you staying on top of this then? I mean, like, obviously people call you for this expertise, but, you know, state of the art and kind of moving things forward with newer high speed designs, obviously things are getting usually faster, smaller, you know, more constrained in certain ways. How are you staying on top of that sort of educational space?

Zachariah Peterson: Right. So you mean like with EMC specifically or more broadly?

Chris Gammell: Yeah, yes. Let's start narrow first. Yeah.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. Well, with EMC, you know, being able to be part of an editorial board for interference technology really exposes you to people who are doing some of the newest stuff and you get to learn about some of the newest standards as they come out. So that's been a really great experience. And I kind of, you know, it's a volunteer thing, but I kind of see that as like something that you really have to do. It's kind of like our way of, you know, giving back. Sitting on a standards board or sitting on an editorial board is really a great way to not only get that really, you know, leading edge experience and get exposure to things, but also to ensure that you're kind of doing good for the rest of the community. So yeah, that's, that's really how I stay on top of the EMC stuff. And then, you know, I just subscribe to the publications, right? I mean, they, they release new stuff, you know, new articles when new state, when standards are updated or something, you know, some new revision of a standard comes out, like you'll, you'll hear about it. So I think that's a great way to stay on top of things. And, you know, like I said earlier, you don't have to memorize every single standard. You don't, you know what I mean? You don't have to memorize every single thing with testing, but if you're working in the professional realm over time, you'll, you'll get experience with a few areas that are really relevant to what you do, or at, at minimum, you'll at least get exposed to like helping a client or helping your company get set up for, for formal testing in a lab or, or at least pre-compliance testing.

Chris Gammell: That does seem like someone who's mid-career for sure. It's like, you're going to get this early exposure. I guess maybe going back in your career, how did you kind of get early exposure as well? How did you, how did you get started with this? How did you start building this expertise to, to be the person that people call, you know?

Zachariah Peterson: Right, right. So, um, you know, I, I actually didn't start my, my career doing like PCBs specifically, right? I first did anything with purely with electronics when I started my master's degree and I was working on environmental sensors. It was a kind of a fusion of, you know, environmental science and chemistry and, and physics and, and electronics and, you know, precision measurements. So it's really perfect for like an applied physics kind of thing. Right. So that was my first exposure. And then when I was working on my PhD, I did a topic called random lasers. So we were doing zinc metal oxide semiconductor devices more generally, but then like, you know, we did back-to-back diodes, we did LEDs, we did solar cells, we did several different types of devices. But then like the one that was most interesting from the, you know, physics and mathematics kind of standpoint was this thing called, called random lasers. They're basically, you know, randomly arranged particles that, that exhibit laser light. And the physics and the math is, is really cool. You know, it's, it's really cool for someone to do in a physics, physics jury doing lasers. Like you're basically doing RF plus quantum mechanics, right? So being able to, you know, do all of that. And on the modeling side and the theory side actually made it really easy for me to kind of jump in and do RF. And so that, that's kind of the, the weird thing for me is like, I started doing RF. Most people RF is the last thing they want to do for me. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. You're like RF. That's so slow. Yeah. Right. Only gigahertz. Come on. What about? Yeah. Yeah.

Zachariah Peterson: I'm used to, I'm used to the T in front of the frequency, you know?

Chris Gammell: That's right. Yeah. T's over G's.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah, exactly. So yeah. RF was the first thing I did. And then from there, it was really easy to get into digital and power was like the last thing I really started to, to get into, you know? And I think a lot of students, right. They start with, you know, power. They start with a power regulator, a battery charger, that kind of thing. So they kind of follow the reverse course that I did. Hmm.

Chris Gammell: And do you find kind of the, your academic basis and like the ability to kind of take it back to first principles? I feel like that's always a strong piece of people that make it up to the PhD level. Does that come in day to day or, or is it more tools focused? Like, are you trying to take things back to like paper and pencil writing equations down or is it more building mental models sort of thing?

Zachariah Peterson: Well, it depends what you're doing, right? I mean, if you're just working on board design, like you're, you're not normally pulling out the pencil and paper for, for a couple of reasons, right? Like normally it's, it's about like making decisions on the process is what board design is like, just knowing like, okay, this is the next step we have to take to get this done. But also like a lot of the common calculations that you have to do anyways, like there's a tool for that. So, so again, you're not necessarily pulling out the, the pencil and paper. If you're doing like, you know, timing and that kind of stuff on a, on a parallel bus or if it's DDR or something, you might pull out the pencil and paper. But, you know, aside from that, a lot of the common stuff you have to do is, is not going to be, you know, whipping out the equations. Once you're doing some things in signal integrity, yeah, you're, you're pulling up your equations list and kind of thinking about why you're seeing what you're seeing over time. You get experienced where it's like, oh yeah, I've seen this before. We, this is, this is most likely the reason, right? And then you can kind of test that in your simulation software.

Chris Gammell: I had this very, very random. Do you know the, do you know the medical thing where they say, if you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras. It's like a, it's like a, my buddy's an ER doctor. He's like, apparently that's a thing. So like, I feel like we're all trained, especially in the medical field. You think like most of the time you're scrubs, you're not Dr. House, right? You're not getting the most like wacky type of things. But I feel like in those situations too, where you do see that one example, you're like, oh God, that like silicon bug that just happened to happen. And you happen to get that chip. It's like, that is not the common use. It's basically like an extension of Occam's razor.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah, no, I do get what you're saying. And yeah, it's, it's definitely like that in. When you get, again, when you get enough experience with, you know, especially with signal integrity.

Chris Gammell: Well, that is, that is an interesting path in there too, from the thesis level research, and then kind of like scaling back and just the more, you know, quote unquote everyday problems, but they're obviously very high speed. Digital keeps getting faster. You know, boards keep getting smaller, that sort of thing. In terms of like technology stacks and, and, you know, problems that you see, are there things like flat flex cables and weird assembly type problems or multilayer? Like things, things again, that younger engineers that might be listening should be thinking about and looking into and like kind of paths they should follow to check new stuff out.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. This is actually kind of bringing it back to, to what new engineers, I guess, should learn to, to help them, you know, be successful. And you brought up something interesting with like multilayer stacks and the manufacturing process as boring as it may sound for a designer, I think is actually really important, especially for building stackups. And this is especially the case when you're doing things with like blind vias, mechanically drilled versus laser drilled. It's something that has bitten me more than once I'll admit. And we had to go back and make changes and, you know, fortunately we're able to get boards built, but you know, no one likes going back and making changes, right? You try to find a fudge, fudge, some sort of solution just to keep moving forward. But yeah, definitely building, building boards and understanding how the materials go together, what happens with the materials when, when a board is being pressed, sub laminations versus sequential laminations, how you can combine these things. And then you mentioned flex. We just recently did something with HDI on flex. That was also something we hadn't done before.

Chris Gammell: Was it like multiple, like more than two, like I'm used to like two layer flex boards, like real simple stuff. You're talking like multi, multi layer on like flex PCBs.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. So, so I'm talking about rigid on top of flex.

Chris Gammell: Oh, interesting.

Zachariah Peterson: Right. So, so the rigid section is HDI and then you integrate flex into it in the core.

Chris Gammell: These are.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So that was fun. I think the thing is like, I'm so like, uh, usually working in such a budget constrained environment. And, and again, like usually, you know, people that are getting started as well are when I started learning about manufacturing processes and stuff like that, I'm like, wait, so you don't, you can actually tell the manufacturer what to do. They don't tell you what they're going to give you. It's just like, oh yeah, right. That is something to learn. But then also like the balance point of it's going to be cheaper if you use what they use and like figure out your processes. So like figuring out why I feel like that was always the thing with a lot of the, the U S based manufacturers are like, yeah, send us your stack up. And they would literally build you anything, but they wouldn't tell you like, here's the cheapest method. You know, it'd be like, yeah, just send us what you want.

Zachariah Peterson: It's not in their interest to, it's not in their interest to tell you here's the cheapest method, right? I mean, they're, they've got, they apply margin.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah.

Zachariah Peterson: You know, they're running the business, right? And if you think you need it, they will build it. If you tell them to, right. Their yield might be 50%, but they're going to build that into their margin. They're going to charge you for it. And if you pay it, they'll build it. Right. That's their job.

Chris Gammell: Of course. I need Rogers for my two layer PCB to just do a simple interconnect. Why wouldn't I?

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. And that brings up something important with, with some design guidelines, right? Because a lot of the design guidelines and I'm kind of responsible for this, you know, having been asked to build Ferrari level boards. I mean, yeah, we create a lot of design guidelines that teach you how to build a Ferrari, but sometimes you don't need a Ferrari, right? Sometimes you need a Hyundai.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Come on, go further back. You goes.

Zachariah Peterson: Yep. You go. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Sometimes that's what you need. Sometimes you need a bicycle. You don't need a, you know, you don't need a car at all. Right.

Chris Gammell: And yeah. And I think a lot of young engineers, if you don't have that like person there being like, well, why did you do this? They're just like, well, this was an option. So I did it. You know, it's like, no, you know, here's the full sphere. You know, having, having that is difficult sometimes.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah, that, that comes up so often in the context of like RF, because like, I'll see somebody use chat GPT to create their, you know, little RF design guidelines post on social media. And it's like, use the lowest DK, you know, Rogers PTFE material possible for this, for this board. And it's like, you know, you mean like for a wifi board, the one that they build millions of on FR4, that, that board, you know? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Well, actually that's maybe a good, a good segue too. We are seeing an influx of AI tooling and then, you know, people looking for answers on chat GPT and things like it. I mean, how are you seeing that part of the landscape, you know, with Altium tools, but maybe elsewhere as well? Like, you know, how are, how are AI tools impacting the, the role of the PCB industry?

Zachariah Peterson: Well, one thing that happens when you're on YouTube and I'm, I don't know if this has happened to you, but it's definitely happened to me. Um, one thing that happens when you're on YouTube and you have a lot of articles with your name on them out there and that kind of thing is you get a lot of unsolicited messages with someone making their, their AI tool for something in your industry. Right. Like, can you, can you please check it, this out, give me your feedback. And like, I'm sympathetic. I get it. Right. But like, I don't need to look at the 20th chat with my data sheet tool. I'm sorry. Sorry guys. Okay.

Chris Gammell: Same, same. Don't at me. Don't at me, bro.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. And I've made that myself. You know, it's kind of helpful. It works. Right. But. Oh my gosh. Like we don't need 20 of them, you know? Right.

Chris Gammell: So one, I think you're right that like, it is getting to the point where like, okay, people are making these tools and they are available and they're kind of still following the traditional like SAS model. Like, okay, maybe I turn this into a thing and I charge people monthly for whatever. But like, literally it's like, Hey, Claude, like, can you make the same thing that someone just sent to me? Is it? Yeah. They probably also use Claude. So like, there's not a lot of differentiation.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. That's true. And, and I, I think what people are missing there is whether it's a data sheet tool or some something else. Right. I mean, there, there are others, right? There are like schematic review tools. Someone just sent me a message about a firmware tool, which I haven't looked at yet. I do want to look at it. I think the, the thing that people are missing is like, people want to make it into like their own platform, right? Like it's SAS, like you just mentioned. Right. And the problem is that I think designers don't want to have to have another tab open on their browser to, to have to use this thing. Right. So it's not about what the tool can do. It's about how you serve the capability to somebody that's really going to make it catch on. So that's why I think the one that catches on is going to be the, the one, whatever, whatever, whatever kind of assistant it is that actually like appears inside your CAD tool. And maybe it's the same thing that can appear inside multiple CAD tools. And maybe it's something that also has a browser extension, right? So it can kind of follow you around the different places. I think that would be really interesting. And maybe it appears inside a visual studio as well. If you're, you know, doing firmware.

Chris Gammell: Right. I think you are explaining cloud code right now, just cloud code for PCBs, right? Which I'm sure someone's going to pitch us now too, you know?

Zachariah Peterson: Someone's going to figure it out, you know? And I, and I made a poll on LinkedIn at one point, like, you know, Hey, is this something that, that somebody might find useful if it like appears as a panel, for example, inside all team designer, right? Or in an equivalent way inside of KiCad or OrCad or whatever, right? Whatever your tool is. I think that's going to be the one that, that really takes off and gets a lot of usage. It's all, it's all about how you get it in there and how you serve it. And, you know, once that, once that kind of tool is inside your CAD software, like it's much easier for it to have visibility into what you're doing in your design, because when it's on some other website, like, dude, I have to export a PDF and some other file. And I got to upload it. And then I got to wait for the result. And then I got to like, come back and like, you know, I got stuff to do. I don't, you know, I don't have time for another browser tab open, you know what I mean? And maybe it only takes 10 seconds, but that 10 seconds feels like it's ripping my heart out, you know?

Chris Gammell: He's got YouTube videos to make folks. Come on, hurry up. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker ?: You know?

Chris Gammell: Well, and it's interesting too, because like, from what I'm hearing, what you just said there, it doesn't sound like you're like, well, this tool is going to go and route some traces on this new HDI flex PCB, whatever. It's going to be a helper tool. That's more about design methodologies or part handling or something akin to that. Not, not the core EMI folk, like, you know, resilient design making that I might've expected.

Zachariah Peterson: Well, I think you could have multiple things, right? It's a user interface that, that connects you to some sort of intelligence layer, maybe has some agent capabilities inside your software, right? Like, you know, you have the prompt, it's like, create me a basic, you know, eight layer stack up with, you know, Rogers, 43, 85, 48, 35, and, and a bond ply, you know what I mean? And it just gives you kind of the basic stack up, you know, give me this stack up from JLC, right? Maybe you're going to do one of the JLC standard stack ups. And it just puts it in there and it just cut out a half hour worth of, of time going back and forth between the internet and your CAD tool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's a good one. Anytime you're like browser tab switching, that's right. Like, or like go cost compare three different fabs and give me the available stack ups at the best price and the best price point. And then, you know, where's the bend in the curve, that sort of thing. Yeah. That that's legit work, right? That is, that is going to, and it might be forward looking as well. Like I always talk about like pulling details back in the process, whatever you can do to pull that back as much as possible is going to, is going to help your future product or, or prototype even, you know, just because you've already thought through how you might manufacture. Whereas if you just YOLO at the beginning, you're like, yeah, well, it's a PCB, you know?

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. Anytime you have to go back and make the changes, it's, it always feels like pulling teeth, especially when you spent so much time to make it look great, you know?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The worst example for me is like, oh, wait, that you don't have 3.5 mil. Traced space. You have four. Oh, oh, I have some, I have some work to do. This is going to be rough.

Zachariah Peterson: And when that's happened to me, it's like, can you just push, push your, your limit just a little bit for us? Yeah. That's true. That is the right call.

Chris Gammell: You know? Yeah. Get on the phone, call someone, just be like, the yield is going to go down. I'll pay for it, please. Yeah. I don't want to, I don't want to read your stuff. Yeah.

Zachariah Peterson: I will admit I've, I have done that before. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is interesting with the tooling. Like it, the one thing I've, I've kind of harped on for a while is like the, it seems like the, a lot of the PCB level tools that I've seen have been like, we want to do all the hardest parts for you. And I'm like, no, no, no. I, I, I want to do the hardest, but I want to be there to like, do the hardest parts, do the boringest parts. Right. And so for a long time, I've talked about this on the show before, whatever, but like for a long time, it was like, just fill in my resistors and capacitors. As long as it's correct. I don't have any, I'm not precious about like, Oh, Kemet versus Yageo. I don't care. You know, like in the short term, I just need parts on a prototype, but like, yeah, long-term I need to have a part library or whatever, but like, don't try and do my controlled impedance traces, you know, for 25 hours and not have a result. I will just go do that. And I will, you know, get it done and, and, and clanker, you can go and, you know, figure out the resistors and capacitors while I'm doing it. You know, like that's, that's fine with me.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. That's, I mean, that's a really great example of a, of a simple thing that takes time that a machine should be able to do. Right. Like, no, I've got a hundred generic capacitors in this design, right? Yeah. Like, please fill in part numbers for these.

Chris Gammell: Yes. I, so I did that with Claude last week and it was fantastic. It was the first time I'd done it. I'm not saying it's the first time it's possible, but it was the first time I actually like, I was like, Oh, let's try this. And it was awesome. And it's all I've ever wanted. I've been working in the parts industry for 10 years. And like, I asked for that on day one last week was the first time I got it. So that's great.

Zachariah Peterson: Nice. That's awesome.

Chris Gammell: But in that case, it is generic tooling too. Like not generic, but it's, you know, it's, it's not a specialized tool either. It is kind of general tooling and web search and whatever. It's basically doing all the clicking in the looking in the, so I don't need a SAS tool for that right now either. You know?

Zachariah Peterson: Sure. Sure. Yeah. So I think one factor that's going to make the really successful tool, like outside of like the circuit mines and the C-lesses of the world is, is going to be something that is served inside your, your design software, whatever your like main suite is that you use for your design hub. But the other thing that's going to make something really successful is the data set. Okay. That's, that's going to, what's, that's going to be what makes certain companies really have a competitive advantage and be unique compared to their competitors. It's, it's the data set that they have, how they vet it, what they put in it, where does the data come from? Is some of that data proprietary versus public? That's going to be something that's really critical to, to making these tools for PCB design work.

Chris Gammell: I have an embarrassing admission right now is that AI did not just make my voice better, but I did just click the button that selected the correct microphone. So if people hear that, I probably sound a little different now. Sorry about that, Zach, but you don't care, but maybe the listeners do. I'm not worried about it. It's a, AI can't save me from myself. That's, that's, that is a tool. That is a lesson I've learned over and over again.

Zachariah Peterson: So for sure. For sure.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. All right. Tooling. Have you tried those kind of like level this? So you said C-list, you said, uh, uh, circuit mind, those are more kind of coming up with designs, that sort of thing that, or those are supply chain types of tools.

Zachariah Peterson: No, those are more like the, the design generation kind of tools, right?

Chris Gammell: Workflow style tools, like block diagram, pull in like a switching regulator, just get it done sort of thing.

Zachariah Peterson: Kind of. Yeah. So I think they take two different paths, which can be equally good depending on what you're trying to do, right? Circuit mind will basically generate your design from a big block diagram that you create based on data sheet information. So they've gone through, they figured out how to, to chunk all the data from data sheets. They figured out how to apply structuring. And then they use that with your prompt and some other inputs in a block diagram to generate some schematics, right? And it's, it's really nice because, you know, you're going to get some schematics that you can at least then go in and review. Right. Um, so you can think of it as like reference design generation. C-list will take predefined blocks that are known to work from a manufacturer, right? So the manufacturer gives them working circuitry in these blocks, and then the AI figures out how to just connect the blocks together. Right. So circuit mind is more general because they have all the data sheets. You can basically just generate anything, right? With C-list, you can only generate specific stuff. However, I think you have a much greater assurance that what you are generating is actually going to be correct because you're taking blocks of working circuitry. It's just, how do you connect them together? Right.

Chris Gammell: Got it. That's where the risk goes in. It's not like a translation error from like OCR to, you know, go and look at a schematic and be like, oh, this is probably this type of inductor or whatever. It's literally that inductor for the other one. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Nice.

Zachariah Peterson: Now that doesn't take the onus off of you as a designer to review what you just did. Right. But think about what you're trying to do and think about what you need to do with reference design generation and go for it. One thing that I've been working on myself internally as an internal tool is design reuse, right? But not necessarily like going through and defining reuse blocks in Altium. And it's not that there's anything wrong with that tool. It's just that I have so much stuff. I don't have time to spend, you know, however many weeks it's going to take to go through and define every single circuit element as a reuse block. So instead, you know, I have all of my data from past projects and working on a tool that can then just search through it, find circuitry that we know works based on either a description search or a part number search. And then we say, okay, we just go back into these three or four projects, pull these pieces out. And now we've basically found working circuitry that we can reuse for this new design.

Chris Gammell: That's great. Yeah. And that's like a meta tool then almost. And it just kind of then pumps it back into Altium or whatever tool is necessary at the time.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You just, you just pull the schematics into the, into the new, into the new project. And, you know, you've really kind of sped up what you need to do in order to create something new.

Chris Gammell: That's cool. That's great. And what's your take on a lot of these like software defined schematic type things that are out there, like code, you know, schematics as code. Are you, are you into that sort of thing?

Zachariah Peterson: I'm not, I'm not into it only because I'm not like a pro coder. Right. I've said this many times, right? Like I'm not a software developer myself. I'm not a polyglot programmer. I don't even know if anyone uses that term anymore, but you know, I can do some cool stuff in Python. I'm, I'm good enough to be dangerous. I can build a website, you know, HTML, CSS, JavaScript. Right. So, you know, I do pretty good with that, but that's about it, you know? So like for me to just hop in and be like, oh yeah, I now immediately understand the syntax behind coding up my schematics. Like it's just not for me, you know, just because I don't really come from that background, but I fully believe there are people who are going to, you know, really easily get into that and adapt to that. So yeah, I think it's, it's a good way to expand it into, you know, a new group that maybe doesn't have experience just working with everything graphically or doesn't have the patience to do it graphically or, you know, whatever. So yeah, I think it's a cool way to do it.

Chris Gammell: One of the delineating things for me, I think about is like, so like schematics for a lot of people are like, Hey, I got a micro and I have like little fiddly bits off that micro. Right. And like my background with analog, I'm like, well, I've got a ton of components that have to connect here and there, whatever. Like, so that's when like, it's almost like how, how blobby or how blocky your diagram is, right? If you have a thousand pin BGA, it's like, yeah, the schematic probably should be code because it's literally just a set of connections. If you have a, something that's got a 20 discrete transistors on board in addition to op amps and resistors and all the other, it's like, okay, there's like, it's like kind of the, the second one is much less blobby and you want to have that visual, like a is connected to B is connected to C and like that sort of thing. And maybe you could still render it with a code to visualization tool. But, but for me, because I came from that space, I'm like, I don't, I don't think that's going to work for me right now.

Zachariah Peterson: You know, that's, I mean, that's fair. Right. You know, it's, it's like I said earlier, right. You should, you should use the tool that you're, you're good at. Right. And that works for you and serves your needs, whether it's as a hobbyist or a business person.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I mean, it is going to be interesting. I'm going to be at, let's see, I don't know when this is going on. I might already be at embedded world as we're releasing this one, but I'm going to be at embedded world. And I am expecting two things on all the booths, which is AI and CRA. Those are the two that I expect to see on every single booth and in some form or another. And I, you know, some of the tooling I actually, I, whereas past years, I would have walked right by a lot of the tooling for, you know, like a circuit mine and stuff like that. Not, I stopped at circuit mine before, but other ones that might be in the startup area, I actually will go check them out. I think just cause it's a, it's just moving fast.

Zachariah Peterson: I think a fun game to play is to just walk a random direction on the floor and then see how far you can walk before you encounter a booth that has AI right there on the booth, you know? Right in your face.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Totally.

Zachariah Peterson: Exactly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, you continue to do reviews of it in a non AI sense. You are, you are the machine that is reviewing other people's designs. Can you tell me about that? And like kind of the, the breadth of the designs you get to see and how, how people kind of get feedback from that.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. So this all started because back in, yeah, I think it was like in 2022 after, you know, we started putting out videos on the Altium channel and it started to get pretty popular. People started to send me their design, like, Hey, can you look at this and help me? And, you know, at the time I was like, you know, bro, I do this for a living. Like, you know, I know this person's not going to pay me. So, you know, unfortunately I'd say, you know, politely decline or I just ignore it because I've got 50 other messages that day. So over time I would keep getting these. And then I, you know, one day it was like this Eureka moment, right? You can't script this kind of stuff. Right. But one day I'm sitting there, we're in the news. We had just moved into a new studio and myself and Joel, my videographer, we were in there and we were getting ready for a filming session. And I'm looking at my LinkedIn messages and I'm like, oh, someone sent me another, you know, request to like, look at their design. Like they don't even want to pay for it. And I was like, we should do something with this. And he's like, yeah, what if we like, you know, made shorts out of it? And I was like, one minute design reviews. And like, that's literally the conversation.

Chris Gammell: I guess the shorts were also like popping up a lot more as well. I mean, I don't know timeline, but yeah, I guess so. Right. Like TikTok is already out, but I think all the other platforms are starting to pull that in as well.

Zachariah Peterson: So yeah, yeah, this was right. This, I think shorts had been out for, for a little bit and then, you know, meta had done reels. And, um, you know, at the time we were always trying to kind of find creative things to put in short videos. But this was like that moment where we were just like, oh, we have, we just came up with this on the fly. We have to do this. And so the, you know, the rest is history. We just started doing them. And at this point I have so many open requests. It, I don't even want to say how long it would take to get through them all, but it is, it is a lot of open requests. People really like the idea and want the feedback. And, and yeah, so that's, uh, that that's, that's what happened.

Chris Gammell: Roast my design.

Zachariah Peterson: I have literally been requested to roast the design.

Chris Gammell: I mean, there's, that's like a trend. What is it on? I guess Reddit does a lot of roast type stuff like that too. Yeah. You know, the kids and their trends, you know, I don't know.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. Silly kids. Right. I'm going to be 40 this year. So I don't think I can lump myself in that group anymore. The youths, you know, you got them youths. Yeah. Yeah. And so like some, some of the designs that we saw, like for, for a while, one thing we were seeing was like a ton of ESP 32 boards, which no, I get right. A lot of students kind of start on that. I decided to move the ESP 32 reviews over to my personal channel. Honestly, it was getting a little repetitive. You know, it's like, okay, we're on the 30th, you know, ESP 32 board review. So I decided to move them over to my personal channel. So I'm doing them over there too, but we still have like tons of unique designs that get sent in that we put up on the Altium channel. I mean, we get like RF stuff, we get power designs, we get STM 32 designs, we get, you know, I mean, you name it. Right. So anyone that's interested in that kind of stuff, just go over to the Altium Academy channel and click on the shorts tab and just start scrolling. Do doom scroll your way to, to PCB design success.

Chris Gammell: Looking at all these designs, that actually is a great, you know, kind of level exposure for you. I mean, you obviously have that from other spaces as well, but kind of like being the surveyor of the, the common, the common engineer. What are some things that, some trends that you see?

Zachariah Peterson: I see one big trend is that sometimes people don't leverage their DRC system enough. Interesting. I mean, they will send in a design that has, you know, 900 errors. Right.

Chris Gammell: Wow.

Zachariah Peterson: I, yeah, I think the record was like, I think it must've been a thousand errors. I don't know. I don't remember the record anymore. Maybe it was 3000. It was a ton of errors, but they were really simple, right? It was, you just didn't change the default value in the design rules when you created the PCB project. And if you had just done that and done like five minutes of, of looking on a manufacturer's website to get some capabilities, you would have put in some values that would have cleared up 90% of those, those errors. Right. So the, not checking the DRCs is always kind of funny to me, especially when you wind up with hundreds or even thousands of leftover DRCs, but then also just kind of running with default, you know, values that are put into, you know, a PCB doc file or a KiCad file or whatever. Right. And, and like, this isn't a knock on the software providers, you know, it's a default value. They have to put something, right? So they put in the number, right? That doesn't mean you should just roll with it, right? If you're, if you're a designer, it's your job to figure out what is the actual constraint I'm going to be working under. And then on top of that, when you put in the actual constraint, oh, did I actually satisfy that constraint? So I think that's the biggest trend is that sometimes people don't leverage their DRCs enough.

Chris Gammell: How much of that is, uh, is a disconnect. Do you think there's a disconnect just from understanding the, that there is a tie back to the physical? I don't know. Like I, what I always think about is like, when I'm like, uh, when I'm like working on a very tight design, like I have an 0201 board on my desk and stuff like that, you know, and like, you're just like, eh, pad here, pad there. I got my, you know, I got my live DRC, whatever. And it's literally a case of like forest versus the trees where like, I'm so zoomed in that I'm like, yeah, I get the board. I'm like, oh, that's what that looks like. Holy crap. You know, like that level of just like the, the reality smacking you in the face sort of thing. So how much is it like people just not realizing that the connection that this line on a screen represent actual copper that's going to be etched, like the, the tie back to the manufacturing and the stack up and that sort of thing that you mentioned.

Zachariah Peterson: Well, I think some of that is, is just due to experience because, you know, we do get a lot of submissions from, you know, someone who's a student or they're just starting their career or, you know, maybe they're a hobbyist and they're not, you know, maybe they're not producing stuff like with, you know, Oh two Oh ones, maybe they're doing it all Oh eight Oh fives. Cause they want to hand solder everything. Right. So it's understandable. You know, they kind of push themselves a little bit and maybe not realize what exactly that is they're getting into. And then they get into a situation like you just described. I mean, I've done, you know, I've done that too. You know, maybe I've should have spaced out these Oh four or twos a little bit because I actually have to like solder a flying lead onto that little point right there. And that's going to be kind of tough. Yep. This is going to suck.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's, it is. Um, I do think it comes back to, I do worry about this, you know, kind of the, the age of AI, right. There's all of every thought piece that's been written, but you know, from a personal basis, just thinking about how I truly got into electronics and how I truly started to improve my electronics was not book learning was not school was not anything. It was that I got hired to Keith Lee and I had 10, 15, 20, like senior engineers who were like guiding me and, and it almost feels like economically these days that companies just can't do that. You know, like there's, there's usually not the product need based on like the depth of what a particular company is doing. I was very lucky in that, but also just everybody's running leaner. Right. And so of course they have to lean on chat GPT or other tools that are out there. And then there's, we've just lose so much of the, the mentorship and, you know, someone looking over your shoulder and be like, you should check that out 201 again. That's a bad idea. You know? So it's, it's, I mean, I feel like you might be doing some of those services as a result, right. You know, the content becomes kind of a, a gentle lead into like, I should look into this.

Zachariah Peterson: Well, I guess that's, that's a good way to think about it. Right. I mean, I didn't think about it as, as picking up that kind of slack, but I can see how, how that makes sense. But, you know, at the end of the day, like what a lot of companies do in their designs, you know, some of that is really tribal and, and the reasons why they do it, the actual engineering reasons, a lot of that is tribal too, that never gets made public. And, you know, companies are gonna get into positions, especially due to, you know, cycles, demographic issues and recycling of people, people, let's say retiring. Yeah. Yeah. We'll go with that word. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the companies that, that realize this sooner rather than later and figure out a way to enable mentorship, even as they're trying to run lean, they're going to be the ones that are going to prevent themselves from having to relearn things that they already learned 20 years ago. So, yeah, companies are running ultra lean and eliminating mentorship and training and that kind of thing at their own risk. I agree.

Chris Gammell: I agree. Yeah. And I think, you know, that usually those are the same companies that end up calling consultant at some point because they're like, Hey, look, we got five junior engineers, one mid grade, the, you know, the old timer just retired. We can't reach them anymore. Consultant. Hey, can you come fix your EMC problems? Which is, you know, good, good for business. And eventually I think we all move that direction as well.

Zachariah Peterson: Well, you know, that, that's why I see a very bright future for my own career.

Chris Gammell: Well, I could say that just from your, your focus on content in addition to consulting. That is a, that's a content that is a combination close to my heart.

Zachariah Peterson: Content consulting, I guess.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, there you go. There's a new term. Going to hear first. What are you interested in the future? I mean, are there, are there green pastures that you're interested, you know, like I feel like in consulting, it could be, people could call you for the same stuff for the rest of your career if you wanted to, and you could make a good, good go of that. What are you personally interested in looking at? You know, you mentioned that firmware tool that you might be looking into that sort of thing. What, what are you looking to, to build out your own skills in? Yeah.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. So, um, I have said over the past couple of years, you know, I've wanted to, to really get more into the nuts and bolts of manufacturing. And I feel like I've, I've done pretty well at that, but that, that I think is going to be something ongoing. And then for me, it's going to be much more with EMC, I think going forward, I think that's kind of the 2026 resolution that, that I have currently, you know, again, like the PCB design practices that eliminate, let's say 80% of your simple EMC problems. I think for me and for a lot of other people, those are well understood and are being communicated very heavily. But there are other nuances with specific EMC standards, specific testing methodologies, specific types of designs that I think I want to get into a bit more. And so kind of being where I'm at, working on an editorial board, working with Dempflux, talking with the experts has, has been really helpful for doing that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's great. And actually I could see that almost as a public service too, because as you start to learn it and given your prowess as a content creator, that means we get to learn it, which is good because of that, that tribal knowledge you mentioned, right? That one reason that sometimes there isn't content out there is because it's trade, not trade secret in that like, Oh, Zach's going to expose your trade sheet. It's more like, why would they possibly, you know, do internal content about this that goes outside because that's the thing that they're good at, right? So like Apple doesn't show all of the things they do on their fancy PCBs because they're Apple and they want to keep making leading edge things. Fine.

Zachariah Peterson: Even if they wanted to, like they got to ask like, what's our business benefit for doing that? So why would, why would we pay somebody to do this? You know? And I mean, again, think of it from their perspective. Of course. They've got stuff to build. Why are they going to pay one of their employees to sit there and, you know, be on YouTube all day? That's right.

Chris Gammell: Time is money for sure. Yeah. And not necessarily using it as like a recruiting thing or some reason that it actually like drove more business, which I don't think it would. Yeah. I agree.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. Not if you're Apple or Honeywell or, you know, PPG, you know, one of these other companies. Yeah. I mean, there's no business case for that. So, so they don't do it.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. But again, selfishly as a consumer of said content, I want, I want someone, you know, basically MythBuster style going into a factory talking, you know, Scotty from Strange Parts is great about that sort of thing too. You know, going into factories, showing how it's done really just, I think about it, like building a mental library of like things that I should be looking into or knowing about, or, you know, basically that's kind of this kind of subtle passive learning that, oh, I should think about this the next time I do X type of design, you know, that, and Zach showed me how to do it. You know, that, that helps. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. That's great. So you mentioned some of these conferences you go to any recommendations for again, younger crowd, mid crowd, advanced crowd that people should check out as well.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. I always tell people if, if you're doing anything with PCBs, whether you're younger, mid, mid career or older PCB West. And if you're on the East coast, you have time to get to the East coast PCB East PCB West is the bigger of the two conferences PCB East has been growing and they just moved into a new venue this year. And what's that? Yeah. Yeah. I don't even know how to say it. Yeah. Worcester. Worcester.

Chris Gammell: Welcome to Worcester.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. Yeah. So they just moved into a new venue this year that is also quite large. So it's great to see that show growing and it's great to be a part of it. So go to PCEA and learn about those conferences, go sign up and go get all sorts of awesome education from experts. So definitely those two. I think if you're more on the advanced end, make your way over to design con. I will admit, I still have yet to get to a design con. I've had family stuff come up every year, including this year with a, with a new baby. That has prevented me from getting to design con, but I have told my wife next year it's happening. There's nothing you can do about it. So there we go. So I will be at design con next year. Another great one. You mentioned embedded world. Highly recommend embedded world. And then there are some online ones that I think are great. I think again, for the more advanced end of the crowd, edicon is a really great one.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Yeah. I've never heard of that one. Actually. I'll check that out.

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. Smaller, but they do it over multiple days. And like I said, it's all online. If you sign up free to sign up and free to get access.

Chris Gammell: Well, in the meantime, they can, of course, learn from all the content you do for Altium for yourself. So where do people find that stuff then too?

Zachariah Peterson: Yeah. So the Altium content is all on YouTube on Altium Academy. So go to that search bar on YouTube, look up Altium Academy. You'll see my, my happy face somewhere in there. You can also look at the Altium blog. That's resources.altium.com. You can go to my personal website, ZachariahPeterson.com. I have compiled all sorts of resources and articles and videos that I've done and been a part of. And you can find all that stuff there. And I also have a search bar on the publications page on my website, and you can basically search any topic you want. And it goes through all of my past stuff across all of the publications that I've been involved in. And you'll be able to find something from that search bar.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And quite prolific, might I add. So yeah, that's great. Thank you. I'm glad you're making this stuff. And yeah, I hope to have you on again and keep, I'll keep watching all your things online. It's been great to see all the things you've been doing. So thanks for joining Zach.

Zachariah Peterson: Awesome. Yeah. Thank you very much for having me.