4. Electronic Production

What a great topic this week. It comes at the perfect time for me. I like to make my own boards and I had a lot of fun this week. This weeks documentation starts with some information about our group Assignment and after that I write about my Individual Assignment. Not everything I did this week will be explained in depth. Detailed information why I use KiCad and how I work with it will be provided during the electronics design week. To write it here it would take too much focus away from the actual topic. Well, let's start having a look inside this week.

Group Assignment

As soon as our group-site has been created you can read about this Assignment.

The learning outcome of this week group assignment is small. I had already worked with our LPFK S63 PCB milling machine before FabAcademy. But I have become much more confident in handling the machine and can now use it more efficiently. As already written on the group-site, the LPKF S63 PCB milling machine and their spare parts are quite expensive. Being practiced in using this machine therefore saves a lot of money and frustration.

Sending a PCB to a board house also was not new to me.

In our Lab we have two more types of PCB machine but I can't test them during the last week, because we still have to get material for it. I hope I can test them in a few weeks. If so, i will write about it on our group-site.

Individual assignment

To combine the work for my final project and this assignment, I decided to use a different microcontroller than recommended, namely the microChip dsPIC33CK 100Mhz with 64pins. It is the same microcontroller we used for the group assignment. My intention was to test how I could work with it, especially with the programming.

In the first step I made a plan of the elements I needed to build the board. For this I had to look in the data sheets of the different main-elements to get informations about the resistors and capacities I needed. After I had this Informations I throw all the elements together and connect them in a usable way. To get the right elements I used the library from Nora Nieß. You can find it here. This library is not definitive. Elements are added, adapted or removed from time to time.

The next step was to design the board. After the program has checked if everything is right, all element symbols are on a new site. Between the elements are small lines, so you can see what belongs together. For me it is more easy to open the plan on a second screen to because some lines are springing and that sometimes confused me.

To start with design, I first group the elements together, which belongs together on the PCB. So I get a much better overview. BEISPIELE

After that I start to design the groups on their own. To this time I do not try to make it small, I use the full page. I also make sure that every group fits to each other. That means, I try to place the elements in a way that the tracks are as useful as possible.