Electronics Design

This week we were asked to learn an electronics design software and use that to redesign the Echo Hello World Board with our own layout. Moreover we have to add at least one button and one LED to the design.

I used Eagle to design the board and it took me some time to get used to it. This tutorial is really helpful.

My design was rather basic and consists of one extra Button and LED. When I was doing the schematic, I realised it is really necessary to check whether the nets are really connected to the parts. Sometimes they just look connected but actually they aren't. I did the checking by moving the parts slightly so that I can see whether the net would follow.

Jean told me that I actually don't need the external pull-up resistor (R3) because we can software-enable the internal one afterwards. But anyway I just keep it.

When I was drawing the 3 routes that went through the ATTINY 44, I changed the width of the route from 0.016 to 0.012 to avoid overlap.

After that, I exported the top layer as a PNG file and add a white border (20px Stroke) with Photoshop.

Then the below two images are produced for milling.

I used all the default settings on the fab module and the milling was successful.

For the soldering, the most difficult part was that with the resonator. It really doesn't have much area for soldering. Some traces were acidentally peeled off during the process. Luckily after checking with the meter, the current flow hasn't been affected.

Complete Board