Electronics Production
Here's a summary about what you'll see next:
- 1) Group Assignment
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- China Machine and tools
- Traces Test
- 2) Individual Assignment:
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- Preparing PCB for Fabrication
- Fabricating PCB
- Stuffing and Soldering
- Obstacles along the way and NOT TO DO things
- 3) Original Files
1) Group Assignment
2) Individual Assignment
This week was exciting and totally new to me as we are working on electronics production and bringing a PCB to life. I produced 2 PCBs one for my final project and the other preparing for the output devices week.
1. Preparing PCB for Fabrication
First of all we have to prepare the PCB to be fabrication.
1- In the electronics design week we ended up making the PCB design on KiCAD. Now, we choose plot and select the layers we need which are the traces in F.Cu and outline in Edge Cuts.
2- After exporting them from KiCAD we import them to Gerbv which is a software like kicad gerber viewer.
3- By clicking on the colors next to the layers we change the color to black and increase the opacity to 255 then save the 2 layers together as pdf and the outline alone as another pdf and make sure you write .pdf when naming the file.
4- Next, we move to Gimp software and import our pdfs and change the resolution to 1000 pixels/in.
5- By going to image menu then Mode and choose Indexed we make it black and white.
6- After that we use the paint bucket to fill the areas we want to cut with black color.
7- In the traces layer we go to colors menu and choose value invert and leave only the traces with white color and remove any other white area by replacing it with black. Then we export them as png. "There's a mistake here will be explained in the obstacles section, could you guess what it is?".
8- Now it's time for final steps to make g-code for the machine. By going to mods you right click any where --> programs --> open program --> machines - G-code - mill 2D PCB.
9- First we select the traces png file and in set PCB defaults we choose isolate traces 1/64. Then in mill raster 2D we define the tool diameter which is in our case 0.4mm then calculate and the nc file will be downloaded automatically.
10- Then we import the outline png and choose mill outline 1/32 and in the mill raster 2D I made the tool diameter 1.5mm then clicked calculate. Now we are ready to jump to the next stage to fabricate the PCB.