Electronics Design
In Which I Get By with a Little Help from my Friends
Look. Any of you future class takers who happens to stuble onto my page - Listen to me now. Do not. Do NOT. Take two weeks off in the middle of class. Probably don't even take one week off! It is a bad idea and you will be very sad and frustrated.
How do I know this? welll....
Electronics Design part 2
Luckily I wasn't totally unfamiliar with how Eagle worked. However, I was not as functional in it as I thought I was. I am super grateful that Daniel and Lins were at the lab on Monday, and willing to share their knowledge.
So, cool. Got my board designed and laid out, feeling accomplished. Also hungry and tired, so I decided to call it a day and wrap up on Tuesday. (Never do this.)
Tuesday started out... well, alright. I was having trouble figuring out how to use the older milling machine in Harvard's fab lab, but eventually got it moving. Hey, check out this fancy thing!
No, really - take a close look. A few shorts are obvious - a few are not-so-obvious, and a result of me not having left enough space between traces and pads in the board design process.
So, in keeping with my habit of making questionable choices this week, instead of redesigning and re-milling, I took an xacto to the areas that were not supposed to connect. This went mostly fine, until the very last which slipped and ripped out the nearby trace entirely.
I think I startled one of the other guys in the lab with my swearing.
Realizing that it was pushing 9, I hadn't had dinner, and still had an hour commute home, I decided to call it a night. Sometimes, reasonable decisions pile up and leave you in a place you didn't expect. This time, it's me, totally unprepared for class. But so it goes.