Week06

Electronics Design

Assignment

Group assignment:

• Use the test equipment in your lab to observe the operation of a microcontroller circuit board (as a minimum, you should demonstrate the use of a logic analyzer)
• Document your work on the group work page and reflect what you learned on your individual page

Individual assignment:

• Use an EDA tool to design a development board that uses parts from the inventory to interact and communicate with an embedded microcontroller

Group assignment

Our group assignment is on lab’s page.

Use an EDA tool

I’m EAGLE user for long time, but Autodesk announced their support will be end at 7 June 2026. So I need to choose where I go. One option is Fusion, the other is KiCad. I tried KiCad about 10 years ago and had bad feeling about that. But I’ve never tried Fusion EDA, so I will try Fusion this time.

Through this trial, I found these things.

• We can use EAGLE libraries directly.
• Positions of buttons are different from EAGLE, but operations are very common.

I could finish schematics drawing very quickly.

I found I’d better to have more than 20 mil trace width and clearance, so I setup design rule at first.

And I finished drawing PCB layout and then ran design rule check. There are no error for fabricate.

Files I designed are: W6_Dev_Board.sch, W6_Dev_Board.brd

When I try to save those files to local, I need to do “export”. But we have “EAGLE 9.X compatible” option.

Problem

I didn’t have any problem on this week, but I had problem to install FlatCAM on my Mac. There are unofficial brew FlatCAM formula but it looks outdated.

The solution I choose are using MODS and/or other alternative solution.

Checklist

• Linked to the group assignment page
• Documented what you have learned in electronics design
• Checked your board can be fabricated
• Explained problems and how you fixed them.
• Included original design files (Eagle, KiCad, etc.)
• Included a ‘hero shot’