Individual assignment

For the individual assignment I decided to make a small board with a Xiao RP2040 and control the small servo motor we used in the group assignment.

Given that the servo motor is not going to be soldered to the board the schematics are quite simple:

Given that the process of describing the design of the PCB has already been extensively described in week 6, I’ll just document the main steps here.

My lab instructor requested we should not solder the microcontroller to the board, so we could just move it between boards on each week. However soldering the female pins to the board in the usual orientation poses a problem with soldering because of the plastic on the female pins, and because we’re using single side boards.
Although there are some pins that can be soldered they are not as robust as the through hole ones. so Ricardo Marques suggested I flipped the board and placed it below the board, which I thought is a nice workaround.

This is how it looks with the microcontroller flipped:

I than add the ground layer:

And define the edges of the board:

Because we smallest available drill is larger than the ideal holes, I manually increased the pads diameter to 2mm:

This is the 3D render of the board, minus the female pins.

I imported the Kicad files to EasyTrace:

It gives me some warnings about the holes being bigger than available margins, but I’ll ignore that for now.

After going through the process of importing the output of EasyTrace into candle, here’s the resulting board:

🚧 WIP 🚧

• solder
• test again with Sweep ketch