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05 Electronics Part 2

OCT 19, 2015 ||| Skills: Eagle, Mill ||| Material: Copper board, Components

This week's lesson focused on learning the basic principles of circuit design from Ohm's Law and Kirchoff's Laws to using the programs, we were asked to design a simple circuit board incorporating a microprocessor, a button, and an LED light and then produce it. I find the learning curve to be quite steep this week, and it was hard to find a place to start. The principles were clear enough to understand but there were a lot of different components involved in actually creating a board and even more variations within the components. This was the part I struggled the most on. While I was able to follow the tutorial and understand what each part was doing, I wouldn't know how the other variations differ when selecting them in Eagle other than the fact they "look" different. However, I did find routing to be more enjoyable but also challenging. I initially tried to untangle it myself, but then had to refer to the example to figure out certain "tricks" involved (such as utilizing the space between components or connecting grounds together). Also, in the board view in Eagle, you can change the thickness of the routes to make sure that they they can be milled distinctively. So for the two routes running between the Attiny, I had to change them from 0.016 to 0.012. In the end, I think there's a lot to learning in building up the repertoire of knowing what different parts do.

 

Eagle File