Microcontroller Programming

PCB Design:

In Eagle, I adapted the basic microcontroller board design to include a tactile switch and an LED. I had to expand the board footprint and move some of the traces around to get everything to fit, but it still ended up being pretty compact. I then exported the traces in a png file.

Milling:

I milled my board on the CBA modela without a hitch. I went straight to the command line and converted my png to path and to rml files with the fab modules.

Stuffing:

Stuffing was again pretty quick once I had found all the necessary components. I used some 10k resistors for the LED and switch. The trickiest component to attache was the 20kHz resonator as it mostly covered the copper pads, so the solder had to be under the component. I modified a 2x3 pin header into a 6x1 header and attached it to the board to interface with the FTDI USB cable.

Testing:

I had quite a bit of trouble trying to communicate with my board. I think most of the problems were due to Windows. I wrote an appropriate C program and got my LED to light up. I'll have to try things out on my Linux machine to see if the process is a bit smoother.