Enjoy adding wireless to your projects, but too intimidated to try designing your own antennas? Looked at the wrong way, wireless stuff can be scary, but if you follow Colin Karpfinger’s Dropout’s Guide to PCB Trace Antenna Design, you should be well along the way to having a functional project in no time. It might not be worth your time for the occasional prototype (modules such as the xBee are $20 and just work), however if you plan to make many copies of your circuit, or just want to learn more about RF design, this could be a fun project.
His directions remind me of a fond memory from my undergraduate electrical engineering education, where we had to make a wireless project. Some of my fellow students spent days optimizing an antenna design for their design, where as I just slept in and then took a longish piece of wire and cut it down until it worked. Wait, maybe that wasn’t that great of lesson… [via hacked gadgets]
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