Visualizing Innovation: The Art of PCB Motor Design

Welcome Sam Aldhaher, power engineer and 3D graphic artist!

• Sam has always been interested in art…and power engineering
• He primarily works in Blender and has been for 5-6 years
• Inputs and outputs
• Starting from Altium / KiCad for eCAD
• Blender doesn’t accept step files, it works with meshes like STL
• KiCad -> Blender is a good flow, as there are add-ons to import KiCad
• Making a good visulalization is all about lighting, materials
• Building library of models
• Modeling magnetic fields
• Research in wireless power
• openEMS vtk format
• The marjority of tooling is glued together with python
• ElectroMag Nodes – Sam‘s tool – $1
• Right hand rule
• Developing intuition
• Elmer finite element solver
• Past guest Katerina Galitskaya also visualized RF and talked about the differences of testingi n a chamber vs building a visualization
• FastHenry is inductance tool that was created in 80s at MIT for wirebonds. Didn’t have a visualization front end, like SPICE
• 3D whiteboard
• Using Blender to prototype and then taking it to other tools (CST, Ansys)
• Validating on the bench with an impedance analyzer
• Simulating power loss is difficult
• Quality factor
• “CAD is too perfect”
• Adding surface imperfections
• Node system is similar to simulink, adding blocks (Chris also thought this sounded like the effects in Davinci Resolve)
• Lighting
• Making the background dark means you don’t need to have far field details
• Tutorials
• Blender Guru – how to make a donut
• Sam’s video about how to draw components on a PCB in Blender
• Doing the same with Geometry nodes in Blender
• Ability to create things procedurally
• How to create ICs in Blender
• Using LLMs for python glue code
• What is a shader?
• HardOps tool, simplifies workflow (shuffle button)
• Visualizing an Inverted F antenna in Blender
• Remembering that videos are just still frames in order
• Electric fields propagating on the antenna itself
• Radiated electric fields (red and blue and black)
• OpenEMS generates GBs of data
• Blender geomtry goes out to OpenEMS so it’s geometrically linked
• What if it was a ceramic antenna instead of a metal inverted F?
• Simulating 60 GHz from a radar chipset
• Meshing – sample points in space
• simulating points in time
• Impacts of stubs / squares on microwaves
• Human Hand Interaction with 60GHz Electromagnetic waves
• SAR simulations – how much heat do you generate
• Simulating motor windings on a PCB
• The above was a collaboration with past guest Carl Bugeja
• When to switch from near field (electro) vs far field (openEMS)
• Calculating values with inductance calculator
• FastHenry tool on Github
• Sam’s work on artstation
• ZS smart watch

• Fast track if listeners want to get better at this art
  • Learn blender – donut
  • KiCad -> Blender reference
  • Play with geometries nodes (ElectroMag Nodes, Fast Henry)
• Find Sam on social
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter/X
  • YouTube
  • Instagram
  • EEVblog forum