I Love Creating Designing Prototyping

Week 6::Electronics Design


Select and use software for circuit board design:
Using EAGLE to layout the board.
I downloaded and installed Eagle and the fab libraries. I followed FabAcademy2016 tutorial to complete the assignment.
It was well documented and helped to point out many of the Eagle usability issues.
First, I imported the components necessary from the library, then laid them out according to tutorial example.
Next, I was labelled each component and the pins, which built the trace references in the file.
This is what it looked like in Schematic view:

Schematic
Fig1. Schematic view

The next step was to view the file in Board view and to route the traces. I did this manually and followed tutorial layout closely.

In the end my board looked like this:

board1
Fig2. Board view
board2
Fig3. Board view
Demonstrate work flows used in circuit board design:

Then I used the GIMP to make the png file for the traces:

helloEcho_Bruce_traces_resize
Fig4. Traces file with GIMP
helloEcho_Bruce_interior_FInal
Fig5. Interior file with GIMP

Start milling my board with modela mdx-20

milling
Fig6. Milling board

This was the first board that I milled, but it came out with some problems. First, the letters in the "fab academy 2016......" were too small and so tore off the board.
More importantly, some of the traces were awfully thin and broken, so the connections wouldn't be made.
After regional review Jason told me right angle pcb traces should be avoided.
So next time to design pcb traces I have to avoid this problem.

failed
Fig7. Failed board

So I have to go back to EAGLE and fix the traces, moving the components apart and making the traces a little bit bigger.
Then the milling process much better.

helloEcho_Bruce_traces_FInal
Fig8. After fix the traces

Start soldering with components:

  • Attiny44 *1
  • 20mhz crystal *1
  • 15pf capacitor *2
  • 1uf capacitor *1
  • LED(WHITE) *1
  • 10k resistor *2
  • 470 resistor *1
  • 6mm button *2
  • componments
    Fig9. componments

    The one part of the process that I have gotten much quicker at is soldering. The finished board looks pretty neat.

    final
    Fig10. final board
    final2
    Fig11. final board
    final3
    Fig12. final board
    Source Files:

  • helloEcho_bruce.brd
  • helloEcho_bruce.sch
  • helloEcho.zip
  • eagle_libraries.zip