W5.A.Bahle

Electronics Design

This week we made simple electronics and I learned how to use eagle to design PCB's. I have build PCB's before so I have looked at eagle but I have never actually made one and it was a good experience to go through the frustration of putting one together.

The first problem that I was having was that I not getting all of the wires to connect in the schematic. This meant that when I went to do the routing that I couldn't actually route the pads that I needed to. I actually had to ask a lab mate becuase I really thought that I was connecting things and he suggested that I should move parts around after connecting them to check if the wires moved as well.

After fixing this I tried to mill the board, but for some reason the machine kept stopping half-way through its milling. I am not sure what the problem was but eventually it worked ok.

Next I noticed that one of my traces was connected to two of the attiny pads so I had to remove some copper with a razor blade. My next step is to program the board and test it which I didn't have time todo yet.

Update!: This board was missing a resistor between the button and VCC! It could have never worked. I added a jumper with a 10K resistor going between this button and the VCC line and everything worked just fine.