BOARD DESIGN

Designing the board was challenging to say the least. After going to the tutorial on how to use Eagle, I felt that I had a decent handle on the software. The problem was that after using the Hello World board as a reference, I had no idea how to add an LED light and a button. I reviewed the design notes and made an educated guess. I knew I had to add a resistor so I didn't blow out the LED and I knew that it to be connected to the voltage through the button so as to complete the circuit. But where to add it?? I reviewed some online resources, but no luck. I ended up looking at the class website and taking hints from other's projects. After finishing the design in the schematic, I started designing the board. Unfortunately I had a really tough time following the guides from the schematic. I believe that some were even connected wrong. I ended up disconnecting a majority of the connections in the schematic and drawing the circuits by hand.

MILLING

The milling was much more complicated this time than in the previous assignment. My first attempt was going well until I vacuumed up the dust to discover that the mill had not gone through on the top right of the board. It was only off by a little so I reran the mill with the 2D Z depth slightly lower. It worked fine. Then I made a stupid mistake. When exporting the file to cut the border, I accidentally inverted the image in my haste. I had only realized my mistake after the mill job was complete.

TRYING AGAIN

I decided to take the opportunity to fix a couple of things in the hopes that everything would run smoothly. I thickened the wire connections in Eagle (the previous version was a little on the thin side) and decided to clean the bed and replace the sacrificial piece so as not to have an uneven mill. Upon running the job again, the board turned out even worse! The zero mark has been too built up with crud that it produces an unreliable mill. I moved the board to the upper left corner and set that as my start. Perfect!

STUFFING

The stuffing of the board went very smoothly. After stuffing I was talking to some of my classmates and I feel fairly certain that I added one too many resistors. I worried that I would blow the LED and I believe I overcompensated by putting a resistor before and after the LED. I think if this is the case, I can still use the board and just use a solder joint to bridge the gap that I created.

WHAT I LEARNED

Most of the lessons I learned this week have already been laid out above. 1) If the mill is coming out wrong even after a thorough cleaning, try moving the Z to a new location. 2) Use the class site as a resource if you get stuck. However, the biggest thing I learned in this weeks assignment is that your classmates are you best resource. Even down to where some components were, my classmates were an incredible help.