Electronic Design

board

Objective

Redraw an echo hello-world board
Add (at least) a button and LED (with current-limiting resistor)
Check the design rules, make it, and test that it can communicate


Introduction

Electronics design itself means that we have a lot of time debugging, routing and setting up connections. Here we were provided with a reference board and were asked to design and mill our own from scratch

Hello World Board Design

We were asked to design an helow world board as are first pcb design assignment it was interesting to learn how PCBs are designed in an industry using some of the EDA tools that we have.
The softwares used in fabacademy are quiet hobbyist type but they introduce use to some professional once also. I used Autodesk Eagle to design my board.
To be honest I don't like the search feature of eagle it seem broken on my mac. I have the time I would switch to KiCad instead. Its open-source and a better alternative.
The design files look like this foe some reason.

route

I was using an Attiny 44 because of the stock availability in our lab. We had a couple of them lying aroung in the inventory. I know they are old but due to supply shortage we couldn't get our hands dirty on the newer chips.

Problems that I encountered

This week we also had a lot of problems especially with the end mills. Mine broke in the process of milling the board half way. In total I was able to mill only 6 PCBs with the 1/64 end mill. I even encountered a bit of image sizing issue while exporting with Eagle on my Mackbook air with the M1 chip. Do check "My experience section for the rest."

Tip

Just use another software other than eagle for designing your PCB or use another PC for exporting the necessary images for the time being.

Since I had alot of troubleshooting this week I was not able to program a hello world board but I was able to survive the panic moments during this week when the end mills broke. I used a broken 1/64 end mill to mill the PCB the results were quiet fascinating.

I'm adding the a shot of all the 3 PCBs below.
1. Milling using V-bits
2. Milling using Broken 1/64 end mill
3. Milling using broken but sharpened end mill. hero

Softwares that I Used


Eagle
VPanel
ModsProject
Arduino IDE

Note:- The milling part of this project will be covered in a separate week if you would like to check that out then click here.

Workaround for a broken end mill

I used a V-bit and a broken end mill to mill my pcb by playing with different settings on modsproject.
Below Is the image of the broken end mill with a sharpened tip.

end mill


My Experiences

My experience in this week was quiet troublesome I couldn't get through with the programming part.
Routing was a tough process and designing a board was even tougher.
Milling and usage of bits is a different issue on itself.
Debugging and finding the reason for the error was time consuming.
Every step in this week assignment was on the basis of trial and error as a calculated guess would land you up in trouble.
I was able find out different work a rounds for different problems hence finding a solution at best but as Niel insists always about demand and supply side of time. It was harder this week to maintain a schedule, the final project plans were also pushed as I wasn't able to perform a triage.
But everthing went through except for the assignments results.
I even had to use a jumper to solve some of the issues.

Then I found out that the board isn't working and is always giving me rc-1 error after which is started designing another hello world board and this time I had made the right choice.
board

Weekly assignment
Schematic and routing
connection
route

Steps to create a Schematics