Week 8

Input

Making Sonar

This week the assignment was to make a circuit board with an input device/ sensor which can measure something. I decided to try and make a sonar board. Milling the board this week was relatively simple. I had some issues and accidentally exported the file too large and had to mill it twice, but managed to get it to work.

Assembling the Board

In order to have the sonar input into the circuit board, I needed to change the orientation of the pins, and shorten them slightly to make it not touch the ground trace. This ended up causing various problems for me. After soldering on the rest of the board, I managed to solder the Sonar board, but it ended up coming loose and with it pulled up the copper traces on the board itself. I decided to hot glue the board down, and managed to solder in some copper wires from the ATTINY45 to the sonar board. This ended up not going very well, It seemed that the solder was not very happy sticking to the wire and this likely caused the problems I experienced later.

Programming

Once I was finished setting up the makefile, c file and the hexfile I plugged everything in together with my programmer. I ended up getting the r=-1 error message unfortunately when I attempting to upload the program. I used the voltmeter to look for any unusual readings which might indicate where the problem was rooted, but wasn’t able to find the issue. Likely the issue was rooted in the wonky connection between the board and the sonar, though I am not sure that would be the problem.