Like most of my fellow students at the Waag I choose for the FabTiny* ,  a board designed by one our teachers, Zaeerc.

Original documentation of the project can be found here: link to FabTiny* development by Zaerc

 

Tutorial I followed can be found here: link to FabTiny*

 

 

Fabricating the board went quite straight forward, png files for traces and cut out were already made so I only had to feed them to the Modela 2.

 

First round I noticed that cutting out traces did not go well and had to change to the z value (how deep is drilled) from -0.1 to -0.15 and then all traces were drilled out neatly.

 

Using double side tape to fix the board  I noticed that it is important to use tape around the whole board, otherwise board will be nog exacty horizontal and you don't get good result in drilling.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After drilling out the board I was quiet pleased with the final result, washed the board with soap and water to remove the protecting layer (meant to protect against oxidating the copper)

 

Then I started stuffing the board with components, this was an almost nerve braking assignment for me..;-)

 

SMD components are so smal to solder by hand, I could hardly believe that I had to do this but with a loup and a pincet I managed to solder all components onto the board.

 

And then....almost everything went wrong because I couldn't get my board working and i became more and more frustrated that I couldn't find out what was wrong. (later on it came out that I hadn't checked all the connections on the board well enough)

 

I tried to get my motivation back on other (non-elecctronic) assignments  and let the electronics rest for asome time.

 

Luckily I had a lot of fun on assigments like Moulding and casting and composites and I  knew I had to pick up the electronics stuff  again. This time I decided not to give up till it should work perfectly (I had skipped input and output devices took)

 

So, turning back to assigment Electronic production and make a working board this time was my goal.

 

It turned out that, due to my bad soldering skills (and my eyes) and my impatience I had made 4 or even more soldering faults!

This could only be seen through a magnified loup.

 

After trying and trying over again, and great help from one our my teachers in the end it succeed to have a perfect fabisp boards and succesfully could flash it and burn fuses!

 

I don't think it is of much use to describe all steps, because the manual from Zaerc speaks for itself: link to programming the board

 

For programming I used a second working Fabisp and not the Arduino.

The compiled code was already for hand, so I made use of that

 

After succesfully flashing my board I typed the command: lsusb on one of the linux (ubuntu) machines and it showed up finally!

 

I now finally have a fully functioning fabisp board, many thanks to Zaerc for great help and patience!