Week 6 March 1st: Electronics Design

Editing and Designing a new board

Ah, my old nemesis electronics and soldering, we meet again. Albeit an essential part of the the FabAcademy coursework, I am but nonetheless annoyed to meet you again. I expect that I shall break or at least fail multiple times in this endeavor for this week and I hope but I have the clemency to see this through.

To start off this week, I actually didn't procrasinate nor play games but read up on what all the components of the circuit board were and the course materials. And then I realized its Thursday Wings night with Ranch and Vindaloo chicken wings so I stopped. However the next day I came to the FabLab and Eduardo taught us how to use the software. I used Eagle(Legally(hue) bought by AutoCad last year, good for them) to design the board and thought, hey this doesn't look that bad. And then after an hour of me muttering "What the FiretrUCK?" under my breathe and Eduardo smiling at my frustration, I made the Hello World board on Eagle. From then on, I chose an Orange LED(#UTAustin) to add, using the calculator and finally ended up with what initially looked like a job well done.

It was not.

To start off with, it turns out I somehow deleted a route or mislabeled a route right before I exported it as a png. Not only that, I forgot to add the borders to match the size of the traces and the outline, which caused the uneven shape. Sigh, how does human error always creep in when working with electronics. So I tried again. Did I also mention I had to use photoshop in Spanish and the only Spanish I ever picked up from college was "Mucho mole por favor"? So that was fun. I did try something new though and extended the legs of the ATtiny to see if that would better facilitate soldering.

However it looks like it was difficult to get three circuits underneath the ATtiny and was causing problems for the board. At this point though I was hungry somehow unconciously very thirsty for alcoholic beverages and no one else was at the lab so I figured, "Hey, I need a beer(or 3)" so I got some sushi and beer. And then while finishing my 3rd beer and playing pogs with my failed boards I thought, "Hey, I what if I just moved one of the circuits outside." and added some zero K resistors and also while on my 5th beer, "Hey you know what this board looks like...?" And came out with this

This is the .png for the design file: Download .png file

My eagle files for the beer pcb seems to be on my home computer, so I will first put the roland mill files here : Download outline .rml file Download traces .rml file

At this point it was 9pm on a Friday and I was pre gaming hard so I left to consume many more alcoholic bevs. (to be continued)

After a really expensive and regret filled weekend, I came to the lab and finished the board by soldering the components together. After I connected it the PC and fortunately enough it didn't blow up nor heat up although unfortunately enough when I tried programming it, it didn't work but it's alright cuz this week we don't have to program it so I should have just probably not mentioned my futile attempt and programming it in the first pla-

Conclusions: Beer is good. Also, although we only barely entered the world of electronic design, it wasn't as daunting a task as I predicted it might be. Once you understand what the components are you even have a basic sense of where to put them instead of having to refer to the original pictures(maybe thats why my board isnt working hhmmmm). I was particularily interested in circuit board design as well since I would need to create a non conventional board that would be able to fit inside a bike handlebar as well so this week gave me some insight as to what potential problems(ex. I would be using a smaller width board so I need to fit all the routes somehow or do layers of circuit boards) that I would have to face for my final project.