6. Electronics design

Re-draw the echo hello-board, add (at least) a button and LED

Check the design rules, and make it extra credit : simulate its operation

First, i installed eagle followed by the link from Fab Academy. Here are the menus where i could check my libraries that are needed for this week’s assignment.


Loading the Eagle library

Loading Helle.Echo board

Menus where i could check my libraries that are needed for this week’s assignment are shown below.  Loading the library and unzipped at applications/Eagle 7-2.0/lbr and from the file menu i could check the library folders. This week i worked with helloworld.isp board and with the board tried to put 2 resistors and LED. Checking both schematic view and board view to understand the concept of circuit.

Schematic and Design view

Schematic view of Hello.Echo
Getting first started with looking at the board. As getting to know the electronics production and designing It’s important to getting used to Eagle program interface. First, I required to load some library that are needed for production. Normally all the components that are needed are in either fab.lbr or ng.lbr folders.

Design view of first Hello.Echo board

Moving FTDI headers in design view
Moving the 6-pin connectors little bit to the right, so i can make a room for the R3 component. Before moving the component because components are connected in schematic  I can see the unrouted path.

TOP LAYERSHOWN

EXPORTING THE PNG

It’s now ready to be exported to PNG file with all the layer for the other components view are gone.


To remove the components, click the view button and set for ‘monochrome’ and 500 dpi at least. For my board i wanted to be more precise so i changed the setting to 1000 dpi.  I’ve countered problem with saving exporting image file with ‘out of memory’ error which I fixed with changing the direction where the files are saved. When the setting is defaulted in EAGLE programme folder this kind of error will happen. When doing the design rule check that is optimized for ‘fabmodules’ I had a clearance problem which means the mill would not cut perfect traces therefor I need to keep distance of left-side trace.

CHECKING CLEARANCE(DESIGN CHECK RULES)

NO5 HELLOBOARD

BROKEN FTDI HEADER

SOLDER FOR JUMPING

FIRST TRY OF FIXING THE BOARD
It’s always good to learn from failures and I’ve accidentally pulled the board with holding FTDI headers and now It made a disaster. Here are my experiences of fixing the board. Firstly, if the whole pin headers are pulled from the copper plates it can be glued down with glue-gun. Secondly if the traces are uncut from toolpath setting just use plain-cutter to manually cut the traces. Last of all, when the copper traces are worn away use the jumper wire(or solder, which is not recommended) to join traces.

Download files

EAGLE FILE

NO5. Helloboard.syw (Eagle files)

TRACES

NO5. Helloboard.syw (traces)

OUTLINES

NO5. Helloboard.syw (outlines)