Electronic design week

assignment assignment assignment

   group assignment:

•       use the test equipment in your lab to observe the operation
•          of a microcontroller circuit board
•       send a PCB out to a board house

group assignment

   individual assignment:

•       use an EDA tool to design a development board to interact
•          and communicate with an embedded microcontroller
•       extra credit: try another design workflow
•       extra credit: design a case for it
•       extra credit: simulate its operation

So first thing i did to prep for this week was to download KiCad and gather information and tutorials. Below is a playlist I made filled with KiCad tutorials I found on YouTube.

I began working with KiCad, I started by attempting to redo the Adrianino. This was by copying every single component in order to understand the workflow. First step was to set the rules. I put the width as 0.6 mm


Another important thing was to set up the Fab Electronics Library for KiCad (instructions in link)
I had the Fab-Xiao sketcup on the side to attempt to replicate it. Mostly to figure out a better understanding of the parts and what they do. How the sketchup part affects the other sections etc.  In the beginning I couldn't figure out why I could not connect the wires to the parts I wanted. Apparently I had to define it in the Schematic before continuing. I named the different paths and that way when I moved to the next step KiCad showed me how the wire placement should go with blue lines.  After figuring that out I managed to redraw the board (although  different since I used sockets instead of pins).
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Version 1 (BIGGer version)

It didnt look the exact same as Adrian´s since we used sockets instead of pins for the Xiao.

Here are the milling results:

Version 2 (pocket sized)

I continued to make the circuit board smaller since having it so big felt like a waste of precious space since there is limited space for the placement within the shoe.  I changed the wiring and the placements to be closer together so the board wouldn't be as gigantic. To my surprise I managed to make it at least half the size of the original one.

The design rules showed 4 errors, but those are due to the fact its a 0 OM resistor


It was fine regardless of the error :)

I exported it to an SVG and made it so the background was dark and the part it needed to mill was white!
I then went through with the same progress on modsproject as i did in the Electronics production week

Here you can see it soldered >

(smaller version/version2)

Here is a side by side size comparison.  (the version I will be using most in the project is the small one above, the original version is below)