Mar 01, 2023

WEEK06. Electronics Design

This week concerned about the the electroincs design, for me was an intense week, due to no previous knowledge about the topic.

Assignments

• group project: use the test equipment in your lab to observe the operation of a microcontroller circuit board
• individual project: design a development board to interact and communicate with an embedded microcontroller
• extra credit: try another design workflow
• extra credit: make a case for it
• extra credit: simulate its operation

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Lab Tools

Multimter

The multimeter is a fundamental tool if you want to play with electric circuits. In particular it is a tool to measure the different electic properties, like as voltage, resistence and current. Here there is a list of the main properties measures:

• Voltage (V) - measured in volts (V)
• Current (I) - measured in amperes (A)
• Resistance (R) - measured in ohms (Ω)
• Capacitance (C) - measured in farads (F)
• Frequency (f) - measured in hertz (Hz)
• Duty cycle - measured as a percentage (%)
• Continuity - measured with an audible tone or a digital display (unitless)
• Diode voltage drop - measured in volts (V)

Oscilloscope

The oscilloscoper is a type of electronic test instrument that graphically displays varying electrical voltages as a two-dimensional plot of one or more signals as a function of time. This kind of test can be useful to detect the amount of noise present in the signals and to discover what happens in the different pins of our MCU or PCB. We tried different kind of signals:

• Sinusoidal signal
• Square wave
• Triangular wave
• Sawtooth wave
• Pulse wave
• Step function
• Noise

To analyze the magnitude of the noise or of the peak it is fundamental to pay attention to the polot scale and to regulate it consequently.

The power supply

Kicad EDA

Kicad is a cross platform and open source Electronics Design Automation suite.

Clone and import the Fabacademy library

To manage in an easier way the components available in the FabLabs a dedicated library is created from the organization. So, using the terminal, I clone the library from the Fabacademy repository on Gitlab on the Kicad folder on my pc.

1. Schematic Editor

I started drawing the schematic layout of my PCB

Component footprint import

2. PCB Design Editor

Board Setup

In order to project a feasible PCB with the milling machine that are available in the FabLab some technical constraints are setted, in the Kicad board setup, as shown in the picture below.

3. 3D Viewer

label