For Beginners: General understanding about Assignment 4 For those who know little about electronics like me (I am an Economist), this is a simple intuitive introduction. For those who are experts, skip this. Definition of in-system programming, microcontrolmlers, mictrocontroller board and circuit board (Reference Nydal Dahl) and Wikipedia According to Wikipedia, "in-system programming (ISP), also called In-Circuit Serial Programming (ICSP), is the ability of some programmable logic devices, microcontrollers, and other embedded devices to be programmed while installed in a complete system, rather than requiring the chip to be programmed prior to installing it into the system". Microcontrollers let you write programs to control several electronics. They are in fact like little robots. A microcontroller works with a circuit board, and this is basically what we need to do for Assignment 4: build a circuit board and/or print a circuit board and add all the additional components. The brain of your circuit board will be the microcontroller unit. Other important components on your board will be: resistors, diodes, crystal and jumpers. "There are two ways of using microcontrollers in a project: a) use a microcontroller board, and b)Integrate a microcontroller on your circuit board. Until now I do not understand the difference between the microcontroller board and the microcontroller on a circuit board." (Nydal Dahl) How to build your circuit board Required material for the circuit board In order to build a circuit you need a conductive material. So, we can use some conductive materials to build or print a circuit board: epoxy glass (FR3), phenolic paper (FR1), cooper foil (Aluminum Bonded Copper), teflon, glass, among others. Once you have a panel of conductive material, you have to take out part of the layer so you create circuits. A good program for doing this is Fab modules the machine we will be working with is called Modela. Fab modules and Modela Fab modules is the software to generate the code for using Modela, which will fabricate and manufacture the circuits. Step 1- Set up Fab Modules in Modela. This was really difficult but eventually we made it happened. On Friday we were still using the original program of the Modela and we print one circuit with the specifications of the Fabmodules but it didn't work. The reason it didn't work was that (what I understood) was that the cutter was cutting on the side and not in the middle. On Monday we were able to set Fabmodules on the computer. And this was my process¨. 1st. You have to open Fabmodules and set in which type of output you want to work, this will be rml. Then it will appear the following image:
Fabmodules_image