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4. Electronics production

Tasks: 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 the workflow for sending a PCB to a board house
  • Document your work to the group work page and reflect on your individual page what you learned

Individual assignment:

  • Make and test a microcontroller development board
  • Extra credit: make it with another process

The CNC machine

Since I am a remote student for ULB Fablab I have to do the the group assignmemt alone in SciFablab Magurele and since we are a new lab some steps (not all of them) I am doing them for the first time in the lab. I am using Snapmaker 2.0 a 3 in 1 machine. For this week I am working with the CNC module which has to be installed.

Inital picture

I am starting with installing the CNC module on the Snapmaker 2 machine that I have used for the lasercutting. All the procees of setting up the machine, first test cuts, trying the bits, making the milling tests on copper, making the correction and finding the right parameters for cutting the development board was an arduous process for the hole and long article. I moved the description of the full process in a section dedicate to group assignments.

The short story of the process:

  • I have changed the laser module and the bed of the the machine
  • Getting familiar with Luban software which is used to create toolpaths and g-code files.
  • I made the first milling tests on wood and with different bits
  • Starting

PCB milling

For this electronic production week we have to produce the Quentorres board described here. This board was concieved to have a quick entry in the electronic production world as well as having a veryuseful micro controller and board at hand to make basic programming learning tasks.

For the actual production I am using a modified board by our ULB instructors. This ¨remixed¨ version offers:

Milling tests

Milling tests

The development board milled and cutout.

Inital picture

Soldering the components

Testing the board

The board offers the possibility for quick programming tests. Here it suffice to say that the Seeed Studio XIAO RP2040 is a development board around RP2040 chip from Raspberry Pi. It has a USB-C connector and buildin leds on it such that the ‘Hello World!’ equivalent program for digital programming, the LED blink program, can be written even without the Quentorres board we just produced.

Below are the two examples with the build in LED and using Arduino IDE.

Testing the Xiao RP2040 development board

Since Xiao RP2040 has incorporated LEDs (more than one) we can first make the tests on them. But first let

Blinking

Software setup

Step 1. Download and Install the latest version of Arduino IDE according to your operating system

Step 2. In the Arduino application add Seeed Studio XIAO RP2040 board package
Navigate to File > Preferences, and fill Additional Boards Manager URLs with the url below:<a href=""></a>

https://github.com/earlephilhower/arduino-pico/releases/download/global/package_rp2040_index.jso

Step 3.
Add Seeed Studio XIAO RP2040 board package to your Arduino IDE

Navigate to File > Preferences, and fill Additional Boards Manager URLs with the url below:

https://github.com/earlephilhower/arduino-pico/releases/download/global/package_rp2040_index.jso
Step 4. Select your board and port.

Step 5. Open the Blink example by navigating "File --> Examples --->01.Basics --> Blink"

The led (built in led) is blinking.

Testing the Quentorres board

Conclusions

References

Dictionary

  • SWD target
  • JTAG protocol / connector
  • UART connector
  • UPDI target

Files