Week 6: Electronics Design
For this week, our assignment was to recreate an echo hello-world board and add a switch and an LED. I had a *lot* to learn for this, and I'm still working through some issues on my way to the programming assignment.
I am starting from zero with electronics knowledge, so I spent a lot of time going slowly through the recitation video, as well as reading through tutorials online, and reading past and present websites of other people in the class. Below I'm going to put the links to what I found helpful.
Marianna's explanation of microcontrollers and the function of different pins
Rafa's explanation of schematic design and pcb design workflow
Marianna's explanation of microcontrollers and the function of different pins
Jaclyn's explanation of pull-up and pull-down resistors
Marianna's explanation of microcontrollers and the function of different pins
Jordan's notes on clank settings and circuit design
Adrian's notes about the ATTiny1614 pins and schematics to help interpret the data sheet
Sparkfun's how to read a schematic tutorial
Getting to Blinky on youtube to understand Kicad details
After reading and messing around for a few days, I managed to recreate the ATtiny 1614 board, and added an LED and switch where I thought they should go.
But when I ran these traces through mods, the traces were too close to the pads, and it caused them to fuse which is definitely not ideal. There was also some issues with the width of the cut, where the connections were very small and in some cases actually peeled off. I also met with Anthony and learned that my LED and switch needed to be connected to the pins differently so I made those changes and regenerated the plan.
I went back into Kicad and rerouted some of the traces so that they didn't have to go throguh the middle of the microcontroller pads.
I then ran into some issues with the speed of cutting in mods, and was getting funky cuts (naturally because it was speeding along), but Ryan helped me sort that out and now I finally have a pcb that is ready to stuff and program this coming week.
