Week 8 Electronics Production

heroshot

Summary

This week we learned how to mill and solder a PCB board. I was unfortunately not able to complete the soldering part of the assignment as I fell ill and have been unable to go to the Fab Lab.

Assignments

Group assignment

Characterize the design rules for your in-house PCB production process and submit a PCB design to a board house Here is a link to the group page

I worked on testing the design rules on the Roland MX-20.

Individual assignment

Make and test a microcontroller development board that you designed

For the first step of this weeks assignment I modified the design that I worked on last week and added another diode to the design to make it more unique.

circuit

Then to prepare it for production I exported a gerber file

gerberfile

that I then uploaded on this website

This site then produces two SVG images both of the tracks and footprints as well as the outline of the PCB board which I then put on an USB key and uploaded onto the Roland MX-20 mill

Millfile

I placed a brand new piece of copper on the machine and secured it with allen screws and plates. You have to be careful not to overtighten so that the plate stays straight and does not lift off the base of the mill.

Image2

Then I adjusted the zero position for the mill and also loosened up the attachment for the 1/64 inch trace mill so that it could drop down onto the plate to zero the z plane as well. Then I I hit calculate on the interface to see the toolpath and once I was satisfied with that I hit send.

Image

This is what the circuit looked like on the board, before cutting the outline.

image4

I then had to change the mill to a larger cutting bit that would trace the outline and I followed the same steps as before to remove the smaller drillbit using the Allen key and then inserting the larger drill bit and going through the same process of zeroing it, creating the toolpath and then running the software. The final result can be seen above, I will have to complete the rest of the assignment once I am healthy and can go the the lab to solder and test the board.