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Electronic Design Week

Professor Goodman awarded me with “most time consuming mistakes made” out of everyone in our class for this week's assignment. Believe it or not I encountered so many mistakes, I am not sure if I have remembered to included every single one in this documentation.

This week assignment content:

Design board using KiCad, Export into Mods, Mill Board using Roland, Solder components and program the board.

KiCad

To start, Downloading Kicad was a longer process than most people dealt with in my class. We realized the protection features on my mac made it more difficult for the software to be expected onto the computer. I also was not able to download the component library in kicad but finally after deleting and then re-downloading the program about 8 different times before it finally worked.

Kicad Finally Downloaded

Library photos not showing up...

Now working! and I also downloaded the Fab file libary shown in the photo.

Here I am in the design space where I started assembling my components for the echohello board.

My fab components shown in the filter libaray

In our lab we only had access to the ATtiny1616 microcontrollers, so here I am adding that component to my design

Next I added the Conn_FTDI_01x06_Male

Here are all my components added to my board. Next I moved each peice around,

And then wired them to their correct connection based on the models desplayed in the fa Acadomy documentation site

Next I assigned footprints to each of the componets in my design using the footprint filter tool

All the footprints are nested and working!

Here is what my board looked like (the first time I created my design...)

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Then I watched a few tutorials on how to wire my creat my board tracings

Initial placement of all the components was so messy I should start over before the next step of designing the traces. So then I started over from scratch and resigned my whole board. Here is what it looked like the second time.

Here Is my board after adding the outline and holes

MODS:

Next I exported my svg files to inkscape and set up the layers to be then exported into mods.

In Mods we inverted each file so that the traces would cut in the proper direction and distance.

But of course after I milled my first board, the files some how where missaligned and my trace cut was damaged by my outline cut during the milling process. so then we swiched to inkscape.

Milling the board

Here are my three boards I had to re-mill! this was very time consuming and frustrating this week...For my second board it was only until I had finished soldering all my componets exept for the ATtiny that we realised the tracing wire connecting the microcontroler where messed up, so I had to go back to my original diesgn in Kicad to fix my wire alighment so it would be milled prperly.

Here is my latest most functional board

Soldering

After milling the boards I had to figure out what capaceters and resistor voltage for the leds I'd need for my board.

These are the components I used for this week.

I used the muiltimeter to find the positive and negative sides of my leds so they could be properly placed on my board

Board complete!

Here is the misfortunate bad first board that I soldered nest to my thrid board.

Programing

This was a very frustrating last process, I still have not gotten my board to work after many hours of resoldering, and problem solving.

I started by downloading Arduino

Then I downloaded the code from drazzy.com

Here I am resetting up the tool settings in arduino so they work with my ATtiny1616 board

Here it is in the arduino

I used this adapter to connect my board to my computer

Here I am selecting the proper usb port so it connects to my adapter

And then this is where my board... failed ad failed again.

We resoldered my compoents and ATtiny,tried attaching a clamp divince on my ATtiny to see if it would work without being attached to my board, I hand carved a few little slits that may be preventing the curcuit connection.

So after many hours of being frustrated with the board not working, Tuna and I realized that I had a missing pin connection to my attiny pin 5 to the wire that connected to my GND pin. We added extra solder to the pin and then re-adhered the attiny to my board! Here is the link to my project fileslink here!