[LIVE] How to Achieve Proper Grounding - Rick Hartley - Expert Live Training (US)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Hailed as the best video on electrical engineering and an essential, eye-opening watch for anyone designing high-speed boards.
What it is
Rick Hartley gives a roughly two-hour live training on proper grounding in PCB design. He explains how energy actually flows in the space between conductors, and how that governs noise, EMI, return paths and signal reflections.
Recommended by 9 HN commenters across 10 different months, 2021 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec PaulHoule · 2021-02 · on “Ask HN: Have You Consulted with Experts?”
Some kinds of "expert" are a commodity: you can hire an astronomy PhD or a registered nurse. Entrepreneurs traffic in a special expertise: valuable, unique and defensible IP. All Roy Kroc had to know was how to teach people to teach other people how to run a McDonald's restaurant. A business that achieves "product-market fit" has a very specific and path-dependent situation. Sometimes you find this "one weird trick" that lets you make money hand-over-fist for a while and you want most of all to keep that a secret. Other times the knowledge is so specific (how do you grow the most rice you possibly can in this valley?) that it's not of interest to outsiders. "Expert networks" are notoriously
Strong rec fxtentacle · 2021-10 · on “Teach Me PCB”
My recommendation would be to search YouTube for "Rick Hartley". The guy is extremely knowledgeable, yet humble, and presents things like grandpa reciting a war story. It's easy to listen to, and I'd take him being on any kind of program as an endorsement that it'll be high quality content. The most important talk for beginners getting into high-speed is probably this one: [this video] because without proper grounding, interference and EMI is going to destroy your HF signals (for example CPU to RAM bus).
Strong rec brunooo · 2023-11 · on “Signal Reflections in Electronic Circuits”
For anyone who cares enough to watch a 2 hour video on it and hasn’t seen it yet, this Rick Hartley video is the recent gold standard of explaining the issues at play: [this video]
Strong rec genter · 2023-12 · on “Unveiling secrets of the ESP32: creating an open-source MAC layer”
Not directly answering your question, but on preventing emission in the first place (and the best video I've ever seen on electrical engineering): [this video]
Strong rec davidhyde · 2024-11 · on “Raspberry Pi CM5 is a faster, drop-in upgrade”
Admittedly I ended up building a board with a microcontroller rather than a microprocessor because I could interface with the modem over spi too. However, this YouTube channel was great to work through: [LINK] It has some high speed stuff with ddr memory, fpga’s gigabit Ethernet and usb3 too so I’m pretty sure you could use the same concepts to build a board with a microprocessor on it. Proper grounding, emi, impedance control and length matching are well explained. I think he has some more advanced courses via his website too. Additionally, this was an ah-ha moment video for me: [this video]
Recommends mordae · 2023-05 · on “The Mysterious 50 Ohm Impedance: Where It Came from and Why We Use It”
The article is not that good, but whatever. I am new to electronics myself and quite fascinated how has the art progressed in the past hundred or so years. There are people remembering "we were doing it wrong". Incredible. Anyway, if you are interested in signals traveling inside those cute green multi-GHz boards you make your living off, go watch Rick Hartley. [this video] (How to Achieve Proper Grounding) [LINK] (What your Differential Pairs Wish You Knew)
Recommends dragontamer · 2024-06 · on “I like the RP2040”
The professionals use PCB-design software with physical modeling / FEA to calculate estimates to all of the important parameters of the circuit board (including how much trace lengths matter... but also board-capacitance, resistances, and resonance frequencies of the board itself, etc. etc.) In contrast, we hobbyists deal with "rules of thumb", because none of us will spend $4000+ on professional PCB software that run these calculations for us. And furthermore, we aim very conservative because its very difficult to debug a PCB layout issue... as we hobbyists are functionally blind to all of these issues (ex: trace inductance, trace capacitance, or other issues). I think spending a good bit o
Recommends dragontamer · 2024-08 · on “So you want to build an embedded Linux system?”
This is advanced level PCB design. You need to know proper grounding and differential pairs and length matching to accomplish what is listed in this article. These are very difficult topics, but this 2 hour video should give you an idea of what's going on here: [this video] -------- If this is too much for you, then instead stick to microcontrollers and other sub-100Mhz or sub-20Mhz projects. But 500MHz and above that requires length matching with controlled impedances is waaaayyyyy outside the scope for a beginner designer. --------- Beginner design is easier at 20MHz or so. The faster your signals, the more susceptible to noise they are. Those 500MHz+ Linux MPUs may fail to boot or fail spuriou