Project 05: Electronics Design

This week was a relatively straight-forward week. We were tasked with re-drawin our own version of the echo hello world board, adding in a LED and a push-button, and then milling and stuffing it.

To design my board, I used EAGLE. It took a little while to get the hang of, but eventually it clicked with me (hint: the keyboard command interface is your friend). My board layout was essentially the same as the original, but with the LED and button both placed in the lower-left corner.

There are a few things to watch out for in EAGLE:

After designing the board, I milled it on the Modela. My first cut came out beautiful, but half of the board wasn't cut all the way through. My second cut was a bit rougher, but worked fine. Stuffing the board was also fairly straight-forward.

I did attempt to program my board, mostly following Dan Chen's documentation from the previous year to use Arduino, but couldn't get it to work; the Arduino was able to successfully upload code to the device, but the program did not run as expected. Colleagues were able to program their boards using the same computer, programmer, and Arduino sketch, so the culprit was likely some physical issue on my board that I was unable to diagnose. A mystery to be solved when we get to the Embedding Programming unit!