week 2/project 2 go back

electronics production


background

this week's assignment: make an in-circuit programmer by milling the PCB, program it (using the ATtiny45)


milling

so many ideas, so little time. i started out moderately ambitious, aiming to mill my little programmer into the "mother of all programmers". i learned that intricate designs (such as Ada's flower) created alot of verticies that were interpreted as dots.

lady ada trace lady ada trace






















so i figured it would be interesting to bring the design to a simpler state, while still experimenting with the mill as a creative tool. this brought me to my second iteration of lady ada the programmer, which turned out slightly better, although time was running out, and I had yet to stuff a board. even though this design was never realized, i have high hopes for week 4's assingment. the two fails on the far right were a cause of 1) uneven board layout due to the sacrifical layer being scratched/full of tape and goop and 2) because the outline of the board didn't match the circuit trace. the latter was purely a design flaw, and with more time, adjustments would have given us the final product.


circuit trace and cut for routing

lady ada trace lady ada trace lady ada trace


regardless, stuffing the board was a fun challenge in its own right; i've had a bit of expereince with soldering, but almost nothing with solder mount prototyping. this translated into a couple board editions to get to the final product...

on the left is the first board, which was a fail due to copper tracings lifted during soldering (always use the microscope, kids) and on the right, we have our final product! this little led made me quite happy

fail board yay board



programming

using Brian's fts_firmware_bdm_v1.zip folder and CrossPack for OSX, i was able to create a .hex file. and then everything went down hill from there. running "Make Flash" yielded an error. still looking into perpetuating reasons. will update soon!


yay board

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