After Wednesday class, at Fab Lab Puebla we had a small class among us to clarify some concepts in electronics.
Huber, a fab Lab Puebla participant, is an electronics teacher at the University so he lead the class.
We had the opportunity to learn more about each component and how the microprocessor works and how to read the specs data sheet
I found Eagle the most versatile of the three and the better suited software. You can find libraries for every component and tutorials everywhere.
I learned to use it with the tutorials I mention below. Have to practice but I think it is a good tool for designing circuits.
I tried three different softwares. Eagle, 123d app and Fritzing
Fritzing Is the second software I reviewed. I liked the breadbord window since it is very similar to what we used to work in real world, so one is very familiar with components.
On the other hand it is very limited in parts and libraries, I tried to find the ATTINY 44 to build the circuit and couldn't find it so I leave it.
A very useful feature in fritzing is the Arduino interface where you can program an arduino and run simulations.
123d app is very similar to Fritzing. Very simple but also couldn't find components for my board.
At the end I decided to build my board in Eagle.
I had some issues with eagle. For some reason there was this large padding on the right of my design. As we can see above there where other people with the same problem. After some working I solved the problem by just erasing a component in my board. You can find my design by clicking HERE.
We had some issues with the sacrifice layer.
The first time we used it in our last lesson it worked fine. After some use it happened what Neil predicted.
With use the sacrifice layer stops being flat and our boards came with some uncut lines.
I don't have any welding skills so I made a test to see if I could use paste soldering with a screen to weld the components to my board.
I failed but searching in the web I found a Spark Fun tutorial to do it. I will try later to do it.
After finishing cutting my board I welded all the components to my board.
I had to buy some jewelery lenses and finally the board is finished.
I did better with the soldering paste but still have to practice a lot.
