how to make (almost) anything
Electronics Design
Week 5 Tools/Resources:
Autodesk Eagle
Adobe Illustrator
Roland SRM-20 Mill
Soldering Equipment
HTM: Molly Mason
Eagle Library Basics
Designing in Eagle
I spun my wheels for a while this week as I piecing together the component list for the hello-world board. I found Molly's site very helpful, which thankfully pointed me in the right direction. In particular, this image pointing to the components and their names in the Fab Library was key:
I picked up Eagle fairly quickly. There were few areas of the program which were unintuitive and took some time to
figure out:
-You need to first activate the tool you want to use (i.e. "move"), and THEN click on the "+" associated with each component for it move
-When searching the Library for components, do yourself a favor and type "*" before and after your search term, otherwise
you'll end up frustrated and waste a ton of time (like me).
Board Schematic
Board Copper
Milling
Once I exported an image of the traces from Eagle, I the brought the file into Illustrator to make a board outline with filleted corners.I used the same milling machine as I did for the Electronics Production week. It was a nice feeling to already know how to do something in this class! Regardless, my first milling attempt didn't go well. The area of the bed I was milling was uneven, and in one area, the mill bit was too high and didn't cut through the copper layer, it just polished it to a high shine.
Mill files
Failed milling (bottom left traces)
I moved my next attempt to a different, and less used, location on the mill bed.
Take two
Soldering
I followed the same workflow, gathering and organzing the components on a sheet, as I had done previously:
Soldering the ATTiny to the board this week seemed like an impossible task when you looked at
pad sizes and spacing (did it shrink?!), and that took some time to get it aligned and connected with accuracy. I also initally connected my LED backwards (green line goes to ground)
and had to remove it with the heat gun.
As they like to do, the computers of the Architecture Lab were misbehaving, so a group of us decended on EECS office hours to get some much needed assistance with this step.
Anthony was very helpful. He also knew we were from architecture as soon as we walked in the lab. Must have been the desperation in the air...
Surprise! It's a green LED? I'm sure I got this from the red LED drawer. Keep things organized folks!
Testing & Programming
Anthony hooks up my programmer and board
Programmed Board