I decided to create a step response sensor. First I looked at Neil's design and made the schematic from there. Next I spent two and a half hours trying to create the circuit without using any jumpers because I wanted to make it look good.* On Monday I tried to mill the board out. The first time it worked reasonable well however I had to cut between a trace and a pad that were accidentally connected and one trace was cut off by the outline. I completely failed when I tried soldering the ATtiny45 on and had to mill another board. The traces milled fine. However the first time I ran the outline the machine got stuck and could not mill out the board. Confused I tried again and it sort of worked. Apparently I had forgotten the offset or my outline was wrong thus causing 1/4 of the board to be cut off. During the review period on Wednesday I tried to mill the board out about four more times and it did not work any of the times. Next I designed a Hello Halleffect board. The board came out correctly but I had an error when I soldered the ISP header on. After trying to fix it for several hours I eventually realized that this was a lost cause. Since then I have milled and soldered a light sensor board. It works except the sensor only reads 0. I think this is because the pin that connects to the sensor output is not soldered well. After attacking the board with a multimeter I found the pin was connected to ground. However it was not obvious where this bridge was. So after cutting all extra copper around the area and removing the light sensor I finally found it hidden under the 49.9K resistor(4992). So after replacing the resistor and light sensor I retested the board. Finally I created an input device that works.
*Please note at the time I was not at the lab so could not have milled the board out anyways.
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