Our Own URL Shortening - emus.us
Posted by Joe George at
Engimusing has been working hard developing our three initial product lines. One of the product lines is on a 48mm x 48mm (1.9" x 1.9") format. The other two are on a 20mm x 20mm (0.79" x 0.79") format as shown in the image. Many of our boards are packed tightly and it is very hard to fit the descriptive silkscreen text between all the pads and holes. Fortunately we have the Internet now days so if the board has a URL we can find the documentation. Since URLs can get pretty big some smart people came up with URL shortening services that turn something like http://blog.energymicro.com/2013/09/12/why-faster-processing-saves-energy/ into ow.ly/oOaBD. The short URL is redirected to the long URL by a special server when you access the short link.
We did a URL search and found emus.us available for a reasonable price. It is short enough that we can fit it into a small space as shown in the image above. In general, we will put a URL in the form of emus.us/partnumber on the boards. But if, like on the board above, we can't fit it together we will separate emus.us from the part number efm48-1. You can always find the documentation on one of our boards by typing emus.us/partnumber.
We are setting up our own server to do the redirection so we can choose our own shortened URLs. It is not up yet so emus.us is only redirected to engimusing.com for now.