week 3: electronics production


First trial of milling FabISP

Failure One
First and very exciting experience with soldering. It took me two hours to solder this much. The most difficult part in this was the IC1 t44. Yeah it was when I just messed up tiht he board. Realised it would be difficult if solder is added on all the "legs" on base then try holding the component firm on it. This way component kept on sliding. I could not disconnect the component which was fixed wrong. Pulling it was the not at all wise idea. It came off with the cooper foil. Circuit distroyed.

Dead circuit

Second Mill try
Failure with file format. Sending wrong information to machine even if the rml preview on screen is correct.

First Successful solder
After milling two PCB at a time, regerence from http://academy.cba.mit.edu/content/tutorials/akf/electronics_production_FabISP.html helped a lot. Sequence of soldering is very important. Minute details like orientation of component certainly matters for circuit to work. All placed well. All the above process took 8 odd hours.

Trouble Shoot
USB header was not alligned well. Neither soldered. So start all over again.

Successful PCB
Finally this one got done in 2 hours. And it works! For programming as well Fab Academy AS220 tutorials are helpful http://academy.cba.mit.edu/content/tutorials/akf/programming_FabISP.html

The FabISP was connected to the AVR ISP mkII and it showed a green signal indicating all connections to be soldered well.

Following the tutorial, the programming was done after installing GCC and avrdude. This process went successfully without any errors.

The zero resistor jumper and the solder bridge were finally removed and the FabISP was good to go!