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[LIVE] How to Achieve Proper Grounding - Rick Hartley - Expert Live Training (US)

Altium

31K subscribers • 2 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 9 people: 9 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2021 to 2025.
  • Presented by Rick Hartley

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

1M views6 years ago9 recommendations

HardwareElectronicsEmbedded systems

Rick Hartley explains how energy flows between conductors and how to design proper grounding to control noise, EMI, and reflections.

Join us and Learn How to Achieve Proper Grounding with Rick Hartley. Send us your questions in the chat and Rick will address them.

Why it's here

9 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended as an essential, highly detailed guide to understanding grounding, return paths, and electromagnetic interference in PCB design.

PaulHouleon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Have You Consulted with Experts?”

…grow the most rice you possibly can in this valley?) that it's not of interest to outsiders. "Expert networks" are notoriously promiscuous so firms have a lot of fear that they'll bring in an expert who walks out with more valuable information (e.g. "one weird trick") than the they can bring into it. My favorite kind of expert is this kind of guy link to this video who grew continuously through a 40+ year career and went from being in the dark about noise in circuit boards to an inspiring vision of how electrical energy flows not in the wires but through the space between the wires that makes everything I thought mysterious about antennas seem obvious.…
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fxtentacleon Hacker News • Recommends

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: link to this video because without proper grounding, interference and EMI is going to destroy your HF signals (for example CPU to RAM bus).
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brunoooon Hacker News • Recommends

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: link to this video
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genteron Hacker News • Recommends

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): link to this video
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davidhydeon Hacker News • Recommends

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: link to this video
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mordaeon Hacker News • Recommends

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. link to this video (How to Achieve Proper Grounding) link (What your Differential Pairs Wish You Knew)
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dragontameron Hacker News • Recommends

On “I like the RP2040”

…n 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 of time on PDN / grounding / etc. etc. study is very worth your while. link to this video 2+ hour talk on just the issue of good "grounding" design in PCBs, but it does relate to this issue of capacitors, trace-lengths and the like. I feel like you'd benefit from this talk. The "correct" way of thinking is exceptionally complex, far more complex than what is taught in colleges. But you have all the basic ideas thanks to the old…
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dragontameron Hacker News • Recommends

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: link to 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…
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nyrikkion Hacker News • Recommends

On “Oliver Heaviside and the theory of transmission lines (2021)”

That video is good for the water like wave explanation that is a very useful lens. If you want a more in-depth explanation, particularly how the field is in the dielectric and the wires/traces are simply the wave guide, this long presentation by Rick Hartley will help move to the next level. link to this video The dramatic shift in behavior above the audio frequency range is where the water wave lens starts to fall down IMHO. I was looking at my brothers memory card from a Cray 1a the other day and that video popped in my head. They had the timing traces snaking through several flat-pack chips legs. No wonder they had to move from parity to Hamming code even with exclusively using differential twisted…
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aaronmdjoneson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Vibe-Coding a PCB – surprisingly good”

I have some further video recommendations: link to this video ("How to achieve proper grounding") link ("Keys to control noise, interference, and EMI in PCBs") link ("What your differential pairs wish you knew") link ("Secrets of PCB optimization") These are all by Rick Hartley (from GP's comment) and they are all worth watching in this order.
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u/schuylerhorkyin r/embedded • Mentions

Best lectures/videos for embedded topics? Where online are you getting great content for mastering practical topics in embedded systems? These are two that've helped me do great PCB layout. **PCB layout theory** Rick Hartley **Kicad/Altium and PCB layout** Phil's lab  Where are you learning about topics like these? **High speed digital circuit design** **Analog circuits** **C for embedded systems, RTOS** **Signal processing** **Computer vision** **Motor type selection**
12View on Reddit

aaronmdjoneson Hacker News • Mentions

On “The magic of DC-DC voltage conversion (2023)”

> so wouldn't it be better to put power/ground on the outer layers and keep signals in the middle? Signals must never cross a break or split in the plane they're referencing (usually 0V or ""ground""). This creates huge EMI problems. Your proposal would have signals on layer 2 crossing a split in the ground plane on layer 1 (that split caused by power traces). Some interesting material on the subject: link link link to this video link
View on Hacker News