Electronic Design

Electronic design encompasses the intricate process of conceptualizing, prototyping, and refining electronic circuits and systems. It involves the integration of components such as resistors, capacitors, transistors, and microprocessors to create functional devices that serve a myriad of purposes, from consumer electronics to industrial machinery.

In the realm of electrical circuit design, several software tools are indispensable for engineers and designers, streamlining the process from concept to realization. Some of them are:

Altium Designer
Kicad
Autodesk fusion Electronic
live wire

Group Assignment

The Kannai team as usual was divided into two and i worked with Ahmad Tijjani Ishaq The task is to use the test equipment in your lab to observe the operation of a microcontroller circuit board and our documentation can be found in Our group assignment page

Individual Assignment

NOTE

All source files can be found Here at the side bar. For indepth reference we can consult Fusion electronics page kannai reference

Assignment for the week is to use an EDA tool to design a development board to interact and communicate with an embedded microcontroller, produce it, and test it

extra credit: try another design workflow

extra credit: design a case for it

extra credit: simulate its operation

I designed and Produced my final Project electronic board and to do that i follow the following processes:

Design
Preparation of Milling Data
Milling Operation
Post milling processing
Soldering
testing

All processes have been discussed in detail in Electronics production week Except for Design. This weeks documentation will focus more on the design aspect.

Design

I made two boards for my final project.

Board 1: xiao rp2040 board

Board 2: pi pico board

Board 1

I am very used to Altium Designer, I decided to try my hands on Autodesk fusion 360 electronics to increase my versatility and enhance my design options.
I was introduced to it by my Local Instructor Yuich Tamiya and i really enjoyed using it. I follow the following processes to do my design.

For indepth reference we can consult Fusion electronics page kannai reference

I started by creating a new electronic design

I then opened the schematic and started adding components from the components library based on my design. To add components one has to input "add" into the command line. Fusion electronics have so many command used for design processes.

for components that are not available i download their footprint and schematic from SNAPEDA website

I set up my DRC (design rule)

I then transfer to pcb

I did the routing and with routing completed i then exported my top layer, Pads layer, and outline trace as png images

Preparation of milling Data

For data preparation i used mods website, Explanation on how to use mods properly can be found in my electronic production week
After obtaining my data i proceed to cut mill the board.

Milling

I used the genmitsu cnc to mill my board with the help of Gsender software, you can refer to my week 4 electronics production page for indepth on the use of the cnc machine.

Soldering

I did soldering for my board, i soldered all the components.

TESTING

Board 2

My final project requires a lot of pins than xiao seed studio can provide, hence i made another one with pi pico. The processes are similar as above and the snap shots are shown below.