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9. Electronics Design

The assignment for this week was to use an EDA tool to design a development board to interact and communicate with an embedded microcontroller, produce it, and test it.

PCB design

Since I was not familiar with the KiCad program, I needed to familiarize myself with the interface first, so I found the KiCad 8 documentation․ Here is the link. - KiCad 8 I had KiCad 7 installed in my computer. I downloaded and installed the Fab library https://gitlab.fabcloud.org/pub/libraries/electronics/kicad. But with 7.0 version library didn’t work that’s why I installed KiCad 8. Here is the steps of downloading and installing the library. 1. I downloaded the library.

  1. Stored the folder in C:\Program Files\KiCad\8.0 in this loaction.

  1. In this folder are the this symbol library file and footprint library folder.

  1. After that I added the libraries in KiCad. First I added symbol library.

Then I added footprint library.

  1. Then I checked if the bibraries added correctly.

At first, I thought of designing such a board to which I could connect stepper motors and added pins for drivers in the original circuit, but since it was my first experience working with KiCad, it was quite difficult to get the footprint after drawing the circuit.

After realizing that it was going to be hard I temporarily removed driver from my schematic(I will put them back when I design my second board).

Here is my board schematic for this week.

Here is my board footprint for this week.

Here are the steps how I designed.

First I desided the components that basic board should contain 1. a microcontroller and its capacitor 2. a voltage regulator with an LED and its resistor and the corresponding capacitors 3. pinheader for programming (UPDI for ATTINY1614) 4. port for Serial communication (FTDI for ATTINY1614) 5. pinheaders for the In/Out pins 6. some pinheaders for the Ground and VCC

This list of components was provided by Maxime from Neil’s resource
http://academy.cba.mit.edu/classes/embedded_programming/t1614/hello.t1614.echo.png

I used Attiny 1614 microcontroller. For that I find pinout of the board.

After that I started to add components.

  1. Microcontroller Attiny 1614.

  1. Pinheaders for the In/Out pins

  1. Pinheaders for programming

  2. Pinheaders for Serial communication

  1. Pinheaders for power supply

  2. Led, switch, resistors

  3. Voltage regulator

After adding all components anc wireing them I did Electrical rule check and found that it had 2 errors.

I added power flag for 5V and GND and it helped to solve this problem.

After that I added my schematic in footprint editor with this option.