Sam Spaulding

Week 6: Circuit Design

Design

This week we learned the basics of circuit design. The assignment was to modify Neil's design of small microcontroller board in Eagle, adding in a push button and an LED, then mill and stuff it.

I started out by recreating the board in schematic form, then adding in the switch button and LED. You can see the schematic below!



Next came the process of board layout and route tracing! Fun, fun, fun. See, the schematic is really just a shorthand way of telling Eagle "Hey, Eagle, Part X is connected to Part Y" and Eagle says "Cool, but uh y'know that could happen in about a million different ways, so how about a little more info, ok?" and the board layout is where you specify exaclt ythe hows and the why's of what goes where.
So, as you can tell, it's a tricky process - I had a lot of help from Dan Novy (thanks Dan!) and Jeff Duval (thanks Jeff!) in learning the types of considerations in routing. But I finished it up and the final project is here!

Milled a nice board (if a little deeper than I had anticipated) and cleaned it up a bit afterwards, it came out looking great! Then, assembled to components and stuffed the board - soldering went a lot quicker this time around, I can definitely feel the improvement!