12. Output devices¶
During this week we worked on the Group Assignment
This week’s assignment was to add an output device to a microcontroller board designed by myself.
I followed the workflow described in Electronigs design for the two boards I designed and fabricated for this week.
I decided to redraw the hello.LCD.44 example usign Kicad,
I had some failed attempts.
One problem that I identified was the settings for the milling machine. I went back to the KiCAD design and reviewed the design rules. I changed the track width to 0,5 mm to make them wider. I also created a footprint for the pinheaders and added a trough hole to achieve a stronger configuration on the board (as I did on inputs week).
By designing this board I learned some useful tricks to connect parts of the board which are enclosed by other tracks. One is to press ‘v’ to include a “via” and draw a track in the other layer of the board (appears in green) which can been connected making holes and passing a wire on the bottom of the board (this is could be useful to connect points that are far in different sides of the board.
Another option for points that are near each other is using a resistance with zero value. As I didn’t have that component I soldered two copper wires as bridges in that part of the board.
This was a little tricky becasuse the wires need to be in vertical position, and when it gets hot, the welding in the first point melts, so as with other components, using tweezers to manipulate it will make it easier. I had to remake the board because there were some errors when trying to burn the bootloader.
So I made several attempts at the design and the soldering and finally a new board was soldered and the bootloader was burned correctly.
Then I connected it and uploaded the example code to it, apparently, everything was ok but the message wasn´t shown in the display so I proceeded to check the connections, there was a pair of wires without connectivity and a broken track, so a copper wire helped to rescue the board and it worked.
Then I modified Neil’s code and was able to send mesagges to the display.
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