This week's challenge? To manufacture, solder, and program your board - from scratch! We started with copper boards, milled them out, then stuffed the components onto the board - and finally, hooked the board up via the AVR programmer and got it set up in terminal.
The traces for the conductive pathways.
Outline trace.
Component plan for soldering the circuit.
First, I milled out the copper boards on the modela mill. I was lucky that I had a really sharp end mill at the time so my traces came out perfect on the first try! An unusual feat, I know.
Next, I soldered up the board making sure to be really careful with the delicate and small components, such as the USB board the 6 pin header. I double checked for shorts and bridges with a multimeter and it all checked out.
Finally, I hooked up my circuit to the AVR and got a green light - indicating that there were no shorts and that I could proceed with the last step: programming in terminal!
I am super excited about using this circuit board to code cool things in the future! I was also pleasently surprised as to how easy it was to manufacture circuit boards in house - which could potentially save me a lot of time and money over outsourcing to PCB manufacturers.