WEEK 3: ELECTRONICS PRODUCTION

This week we started diving into the amazing world of electronics. The idea was to fabricate an in-circuit programmer, using the provided circuit configuration and component list.

Cutting the board

Not trusting too much my soldering skills, I decided to cut two boards using the modela in the cba fablab. I started using 0.12mm as the depth of cut for my first board, but I was not very successful (chech picture below). I changed the setting to 0.15 and worked pretty nicely.

Soldering components

The tiny size of the components did not make this process easy at all. At first, their size pushed me to use the magnifying glass to get a better view at the circuit, but I soon realized that I was loosing the parallax of my two eyes and was having problems to locate the soldering iron in place. That´s why I decided not to use the lens. For the couple of times I screwed a connection, I found a desoldering gadget that was very useful (see picture below).

Programming the programmer

The board was ready to be programmed. I downloaded the firmware files and, with the help of Dan Novy´s ISP, I was able to program successfully my board.

* The picture above shows the wrong oscillator in place (mental note: never trust what laboratory plastic bins say they have)

Last but not least, I desoldered the 0k resistors of the circuit and made an IDC ISP cable. This is the final result: