4.140/MAS.863

Rachel Nations is making (almost) anything.

Electronic Design

This week was an introduction to Eagle and electronics design. Since I did this a bit late, Tiandra and I worked together on the design, routing, and soldering to get our hello.echo.

  • Project: Redraw the echo hello-world board, add a button and LED (with a current-limiting resistor), check the design rules, and make it.
  • Tools: Eagle, Modela, soldering iron

We started by making the schematic in Eagle, learning how to use the software along the way. Holly’s page was incredibly helpful, as was this tutorial.

Project 01a
The schematic.

Then came routing. Routing had a pretty steep learning curve since neither of us had electronics experience. Again, having Holly's page to refer to was amazing. Once we got our traces routed, we turned off all layers but "top" and "pads" and exported the file as a monochrome .png.

Project 01b
File for milling

We milled the board using the fab modules and 1/64 traces. We had some problems milling the outline, but the traces weren't damaged so we went ahead and stuffed the board anyway.

Project 01c
Woo stuffed board

We'll see in a week or two if it works well!