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Week 8 - Electronic production

Assignments | Week 8 | Electronics Production

Group assignment

Characterize the design rules for your in-house PCB production process: document feeds, speeds, plunge rate, depth of cut (traces and outline) and tooling. Document your work to the group work page and reflect on your individual page what you learned

Individual assignment

Make and test the development board that you designed to interact and communicate with an embedded microcontroller

Learning outcomes

Described the process of tool-path generation, milling, stuffing, de-bugging and programming Demonstrate correct workflows and identify areas for improvement if required

Table of Content

Introduction

Hi, in this documentation, I will show you how I made my board by transforming the design to a real object, going through the milling, soldering process, and lots of struggling. Let’s dive into it!

Design

During electronic week, we’ve designed our first pcb with KICAD. The design that I’ve made in Electronic Design week is a PCB in the shape of a fox (inpired by the logo of gitlab).

When it comes to circuit board, it reminds me that when I was little, I used to open the big box and I’ve tried to touch the motherboard of my dad’s pc. The images of circuit board showed in class are very different from what I have in mind. Instead of green, they are cooper brown. And I wonder why.

Our design file is ready!

How to turn the design into

CNC PRODUCTION

CNC Production consists of

Step Action Result
1 In KICAD go to File and click Plot A window with the select appears
2 Select F.Cu and Edge.Cuts and export In the folder of your kicad project you’ll see some files has been created
3 Export the drill files
4 Transfer these file to the pc connected to the machine

Now I have the gerber files, I’m facing a question.

How do I choose the right mill for machining the pcb?

I asked Clara, my classmate that already has done her board.

She said: It depends of the minimum clearence between two paths of my design board. And

Fraise cylindrique and fraise conique difference

In FlatCAM

  1. I opened the files
  2. Double click on the F.Cu
  3. Choose the tool’s diameter
  4. Change parameters from wikisu
  5. Click on Generate CNCJob object
  6. Save CNC Code

Double click the Edge.cuts Click on Cutout tool Choose the diameter Generate Freedom Geometry Click, check the parameters and generate cnc object Save cnc code

Turn On the machine Open the control pannel Set X/Y origin Set Z origin (2 checks) Close the cover Take mask and glasses Cut Delete all the output files if it exists Add your cnc project(milling at first, drill files after)

When I’m on the step of setting X/Y origin, I suddenly realized that my project wasn’t at the right place. So I moved the pcb