4.140/MAS.863

Where Emilee Johnson Tries to Make Almost Anything

Electronics Design

Theme of the week was electronics design. We were introduced to some software called Eagle, which is an open source tool used to design PCB boards. All I'm going to say to start is: hell week. Way back in the day when I was a naive freshman I thought I wanted to be course 6. I took 6.01, and can honestly say that I have never performed worse in a class, not even when I was taking thermo/heat transfer with two consecutive concussions in the same term. I appreciate what you can do with this if you know what you're doing, but good God if you're lost then Eagle is going to kick your ass. I learned that the autorouter definitely lies, which I suppose is what I get for trying to take the easy way out. I ultimately did end up with a finished product but I think that it was the most painful week in terms of learning. I will admit though that I was pushed out of my comfort zone and having to operate in an area you're unfamiliar with is almost always a good experience with a lot more lessons learned than other methods. It definitely felt like sink or swim this week.

Project 05a
Schematic of my board. Not too much modified from Neil's. I went for the bare minimum this week of the LED and the button, sorry. My primary goal was to familiarize myself with Eagle. This part wasn't too bad. I will say that drawing it by hand was super easy, and translating it did give me some difficulties as I learned how to navigate everything. I noticed that with Eagle sometimes even when you draw a wire or a junction it won't actually connect the points you're trying to bridge. A friend of mine who works in the media lab and is generally just awesome showed me a few different ways to check the connections which helped the process along later on. Also helpful was labelling the wire ends and connecting things that way as opposed to having a complex mess of wires going all over the place, which is what I started out with at first.
Project 05b
First off, I will say that 'butt' is short for 'button' and yes I absolutely do have a terrible sense of humour. After all the time I spent with the routing on this board (a LOT of time) I needed something to amuse myself. Anyone can write their name, that's just not original. Moving on.....I hated working on the board diagram. I had connections that I didn't think I had made, connections that I thought I had made but weren't there....etc. You have to fix everything in the diagram, and for some reason my brain wasn't always making the connection between the two. One thing I discovered about halfway through that was super helpful was that when you click on a connection in schematic or board, it highlights that connection in the other area. This way I was able to see where things didn't connect that I thought had been hooked up, and what exactly Eagle was suggesting I route. Autoroute kind of sucks if you don't understand how to use it, which at this point in time I haven't grasped it yet. It definitely lied to me and wired some things super weirdly. I was referencing Neil's board a lot to make sure that I had the appropriate connections especially to the micro-controller pins. Autoroute did help a bit in me figuring out the best orientation of the circuit, along with Neil's example, so I will say props to both of those resources for that. It took a lot of fine tuning, but at the end of the day (or several days rather) I did wind up with something that looked like it wouldn't figuratively (hopefully just figuratively because I never know with electronics) blow up in my face.
Project 05c
Modela milled product. I'm actually really starting to like the Modela. It's a neat machine that I could see having a lot of project applications, and honestly if I was going to pick one machine that I wanted to have on my desktop I think that one of these might be it. Traces overall turned out pretty okay. Things may be a bit tight for soldering but I think I'll be okay.
Project 05d
Board stuffed and finished. It's 5 o'clock somewhere right? Because after the end of this week I'm feeling like it's time for a beer. The components went on pretty effortlessly, although I didn't simulate it or try to test anything on the board so hopefully I don't have some solder glob shorts somewhere that I'm not seeing. The only thing that I'm worse at than circuits is programming....which I see we have coming up down the road, for this board. Awesome! It's something to look forward to right? Regardless, designing a board was a big deal for me so I'm pretty proud of it and I hope that it actually works the way it should when we get to that point.