0.5. Before Fab Academy¶
Surface Mount Soldering and 412 Chips¶
Ferris Wheel¶
To begin learning about surface mount soldering one of my instructors Mr. Tom Dubick gave us the option to solder either a ferris wheel kit or a big 555 chip. I got to pick first so I chose the only ferris wheel kit we had. To quickly learn about how to surface mount solder I practiced using an old board and some old components. (Picture 1) After trying to solder a few components on to the practice board using some white flux paste, I began trying to solder the resistors on the ferris wheel kit. I faced some trouble with soldering the tiny resistors onto my board because I had very long nails. I did use some tweezers but it was still tough to solder. I learned that I really liked soldering with flux which I had never done before, I also learned that tweezers were incredibly helpful for surface mount soldering. At home when I got my soldering iron I began soldering the 50+ tiny surface mount LEDs to the ferris wheel. It took about 3 days to do all of them, as I soldered them on after I did my homework. After soldering the LEDs on I began constucting the stand for the ferris wheel and connecting the motor. I faced a challenge with how to stop the springs on the back of the ferris wheel, which provided it with power for the LEDs, from shorting out and stopping as one of the springs kept twisting up and then touching the other spring creating short. After working that out I connected the motor to the ferris wheel by soldering the wires to the small washers which were on the back. It took a little finessing but I eventually connected them. After doing that and making sure the acrylic stand was connected correctly with the on/off switch, the motor, and the ferris wheel, I it into a USB brick, and the ferris wheel began flashing and spinning.
555 and 412 Chips¶
In my electrical engineering class last semester after working on circuit analysis we began learning and working with 555 chips and then ATiny 412 chips. With the 555 chip I created a simple circuit that would flash an LEDs to mimick a flame flickering inside a Halloween pumpkin. Next, as a class we began using ATiny 412 chips. I started by making a simple circuit with it in TinkerCAD (Screenshot 2). Next I made a simple circuit with an ATiny first with only and LED, then with an LED and a button, and then with two LEDs. The ATiny definetly had a learning curve, but once I could get two buttons to blink and LED I really felt like I knew what I was doing. The basic process of how I used the ATTiny was as follows: 1. Plug an Arduino into the computer with a USB 2. Connect the ground and power of the Arduino to pins 1 and 8 of the ATTiny 3. Wire the rest of your circuit up to the ATTiny connecting it to at least one of the ATTpins (my prefrence are pins 2-4) 4. Upload jtagudpi to the Ardiuno board, making sure that the board is set to Arduino UNO, the programmer is set to AVR ISP, and you are not connected to COM 1 5. In Arduino change the board type to ATTiny 412 and change the progammer to jtagudpi 6. Make sure you are using the correct Arduino pins that correspond to the ATTiny pins (see pinout below, photo 3) 7. Verify and then upload your desired code 8. Troubleshoot the code and make sure the wiring is correct if it is not working.
Building my Prusa Mini 3d Printer¶
Printer Construction¶
The construction of the printer only took 3 days for me because I worked really quickly through the instruction manual and dedicated about 16-18 hours to building it, all told. I followed this building guide for it