Electronics Design / Echo Hello World

This week's assignment was to redraw and reproduce the Echo Hello World board.

I found Eagle to be a pretty non-intuitive interface, but once I got the hang of it, the board drawing went pretty quickly. Some key issues I came across were: how to upload libraries, how to route the traces without Autoroute, and how to export the board so that it was to scale. For this last issue, I ended up exporting a DXF and doing post-processing work in Illustrator.

I ended up drawing all of the traces manually, which I found to be much better than Autoroute in preparing the board for the mill. I experimented with difference trace widths and wire types in order to produce a legible composition for the milling process.

The milling process gave me a lot of difficulty. At first, the bit did not engage with the copper board so I had to increase the cut depth to 0.008. I also found that my traces were coming up very thin and thought that it might have to do with the offset, but changing that value nothing to fix the issue. I also had to redraw some traces because MODS would interpret lines that were close together as one thick line.

Soldering went well until I went to resolder a possible cold joint on my LED and ripped off the pad when I removed the component. The resonator also gave me problems because the surface area on both the pads and component was very small. I thickened the traces once more, redrew some lines in Illustrator, remilled and resoldered, and finally it worked!