How to Make Anything

well, almost...

Week 5: Electronics Design

This week we used Eagle to create an echo hello-world board with an additional LED and button. This was my first time using Eagle, and second time making a PCB. I found this tutorial on the fab academy site incredibly useful, especially with figuring out where and how I should connect the LED and button! Eagle was a bit annoying to use -- my biggest problems with it were making sure all of my components were actually connected (I had to redo some connections until they worked), and arranging all the wires so that they fit nicely on the board.

  • Assignment: Design hello-world board with LED and button
  • Made: PCB
  • Programs Used: Eagle
  • Tools Used: Model, soldering
Schematic from Eagle
Trying to get wires to fit and make clearance! After running the DRU check on my board, I realized I had a lot of modifying to do to make sure everything would be correctly milled.
Final board design
Milled out on modela and soldered on components. (my phone died so I don't have pictures of the process)
The West section had problems with the modela and fab modules this week, so we had to use the Desktop version of it. I used JF's tutorial again, and the only hiccup I had was forgetting to change the endmill type (1/64 -> 1/32) on the desktop before making my traces. I just had to run it with the correct endmill again to make the cuts deeper. I taped my components to a sheet of paper before starting, after seeing a lot of people do that in the previous weeks, and it made soldering MUCH easier. Especially becasue I could see how large each component was, so I could stick to small/close to the board items before picking up the larger items.