Electronics Production - Fab ISP
This week introduced the milling machine as a tool to etch copper clad boards into circuits. The assignment was to mill and stuff an In System Programmer. I have quite a bit of experience working with the milling machine to make circuits so this was a bit of a breeze for me. Simply load a png into the fab modules, create a tool path from it, set the x and y zero points in the module and the z on the machine, then click send!
Here is my board after being milled
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I put the 1/32" bit in a little bit too high so it didnt completely cut out the board outline, nothing an exacto knife couldn't fix though.
Next came "stuffing" the board which meant soldering all of the surface mount components to the board.
Unfortunately i wasn't able to get a very clear picture of this but I would like to brag a bit because I was able to solder every leg/pin of the mini usb connecter while 4 coffees deep and without a solder wick.
Next came programming the ISP with another completed board, I used Diane's. I encountered only one error throughout that proccess and that was because Diane's board wasn't plugged in to my computer (oops!). Other than that I was lucky enough to solder and program my board first try in just under an hour.
