Week Four – Electronics Production

Redraw the Hello-World board, add a LED and a button

Horowitz. Heavy little tome. Still haven’t made it through the first chapter and may well not make it past Ch.2. Retention better than expected.

Eagle - Found the tutorial very helpful, but wanted to try and design from scratch. Found it difficult to find some of the components even after downloading the dedicated libraries - sometimes simply because I had omitted a character. Rob showed me a useful technique of loading the sample board, selecting the info tool, then clicking on the component in question to reveal the part name and the library in which it resides.

I had some issues with Eagle not recognizing connections in the schematic when it came to laying out components on the board - received a message that an upgrade was available, downloaded it and the problem went away. Found the exercise challengeing in a good way - used a couple of 0 ohm resistors to jump tracks.

I realized belatedly that I could have saved myself a lot of routing angst by rotating the 2x3 connector 90º. this would also allow for a better lead for the ISP cable. I’ll redo the circuit to make it more streamlined, but for now will simply focus on the board I have designed.

Had some modella issues (my fault - overcompensation for not milling deep enough the first time) and ended up with grooves between traces. Good traces though so I stuffed and soldered anyway. The board looks ugly around the edges, but I’m happy with the joints, and it tested fine with the multi-meter. Soldered the LED in backwards before remembering that the D stands for diode. Easy fix.

Growing to really love soldering.