Week 6: Electronics Design

The assignment for this week was to redraw the echo hello-world board and add at least a button and LED.

Drawing the board

I used EAGLE to design and draw the PCB. First, I made a schematic where I layed out all the components that I chose from a library. This is the library we used for this assignment.

I found it convenient to type commands instead of using the buttons. Useful commands I used for designing my schematic:

Then you can generate a board from your schematic. In this step, you actually have to place the components and make connections in their physical locations. The command "route" is useful for drawing connections. The command "rip" is for removing connections, and the command "drc" can be used at the end to perform a design rule check.

After you're satisfied with your design, you can export the board as a PNG. Then you can open it in your favorite graphics editing software to crop it and then also make an outline.

Making the board

The PNG file exported from EAGLE is used for milling the board. The 1/64" bit is used for milling the traces and the 1/32" bit is used for milling the board outline.

I ran into some issues with getting the bit to mill all the way through the copper layer in some parts. Here are some things I learned about milling and z-axis depth issues:

After milling, I soldered on all the components. Here is the finished board!