I'm entirely new to electronics and circuitboards. I don't know how they work and I have no idea what each component does. Though I do find it very interesting as I have a lot of projects that could benefit from some lights, sounds and/or moving parts. My classmate Maurice and I thought that it would save us some time to mill out two PCB's at once. We wrote down the start and end points (in mm) and started milling. Because milling just .1mm of copper the dust is minimal and the dustbuster was not nescessary all the time. Though we wanted to see what the machine was doing.


When we started up the cutting of the two boards something went wrong and we had to first pause and then reset the modela. We forgot to change the path of the modela to the cutting path and it wanted to cut the entire PCB again. Thankfully we pressed the "view" button on time. (view is used for pausing!) Then we reset the printjob on the machine. The software however did not recognize our commands and kept pushing the printjob to the machine which kept deleting the buffer... It's a vicious circle. With the help of our guru we managed to call up all the processes in terminal and had to remove the printjob manually from the system using the "kill -9 xxxx(ID number of the process)" commands.

Worked like a charm. Here is my newly milled PCB.


Now to solder all the components in their places. I'm not new to soldering but I am new to electronics soldering. This I thought would take some practice. On the other hand I am used to working with miniatures. I started out with collecting all the parts from the parts cabinet and arranging them the best I could so I could work from left to right. Afterwards this showed completely unnescessary.

Soldering the parts to the board was really easy. I admit I could have taken a few minutes more to tidy up the tin on the boards and have everything be as shiny as it could be but this will suffice for my first PCB.

After the PCB was complete there was one more step to complete and that is to make the thing programmable. First I checked all the connections for electric shorts but it was all okay. My brother Rick had already programmed his and I copied his file to my mac to be able to use it. With two PCB's connected it was a matter of using the right commands in terminal to copy the already programmed PCB to the blank one.





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