WEEK 6 - Electronics Design

Assignments: redraw the echo hello-world board, add at least a button and an LED and Make It!

Building the Hello-World board!

DESIGN FILES


Since I assembled the FabISP, I was looking forward to programming something. Nothing will be nicer than programming a custom made board!

Building the FabIsp was a really fun thing to do so I was looking forward to designing and making my own board. I had used Fritzing in the past for designing through-hole pcbs. It's simple but also feel more like a toy than a real pcb design software. So for this week's assignment I decided to explore EagleCad.



I've always used fritzing to design through-hole boards.. but I don't really like it. It's interesting when you're new to circuit designing but it's pretty limited. I decided to mess around with Eagle and I really liked it. Adding the FabLibrary was really easy, and everything worked perfectly right away. So I designed the schematic following Neil's advices. I decided to keep it simple, I've been pretty short on time lately so I only added a button and an LED.

Once the net was set, I routed every connection making sure it could be milled.

Using the same settings I used for the FabISP, I got some pretty decent results. I had to lower the Z zero in order to get a clean finish, the first board had some copper spots here and there but the board was perfectly fine.

I decided to cut 3 in case I pull a trace when soldering.

Now it was time to populate the board. I couldn't find a surface mount LED in the lab.. so I used a standard LED with bent legs.


I'm ready to program!