Circuit Making

FabISP

For this week the task was to make a circuit board by milling out the routes (or around them) based on a design made in EAGLE. The machine used was the Bungard CCD/2 which is available at the University with a milling bit of 0.3 mm. For this assignment, I worked with my colleague Oscar Campo helping each other to achieve this week's assignment.

 

 

Initially the routes were made in a few minutes (~15 min) but the space between the routes was very small and we feared that at the moment of soldering it would cause troubles; therefore, we decided to run the machine again removing a lot more material arround the routes, clearing out the space around them and preventing accidental jumpers at the time of soldering.

 

 

The circuit of choice was the FabISP for which the design file was already available. The design was based on surface mount elements and soldering them was a challenge even though I had experience soldering circuits with through-hole components.

 

 

The soldering process tried to follow the general recommendations of starting from the center towards the outside and going from the "big" components to the smaller components; nevertheless we had many instances where we had a lot of trouble reaching the right spot and the lamp with the magnifying glass helped a lot.

 

 

 

 

In the end, we were able to fabricate de circuit board and solder elements on it. However, we have had a lot of problems to get the appropriate components for surface mount. Most of the local electronics stores do not carry these elements in stock and some can order them for you but it is significantly more expensive and it takes a long time to get to you (~20-25 business days). For this reason we substituted some of the elements (including the micro controller and USB connector) with some that were available in order to practice the fabrication process, and we are still trying to get the appropriate ones.