Week 5 - Electronics Production

I was excited to finally produce my board. But I ended up spending a fair bit of time debugging the milling machine. Oh well, it was fun nonetheless.

After generating Gerber files from KiCad, I used Quentin’s gerber2img tool to get png outputs. I individually uploaded the Gerber for the Top Copper layer and the edge cut layer and downloaded individual png’s for each which I then used in Mods + the SRM-20.

Mill Attempt 1

My first mill came out perfectly (although with the cuts super deep). I was happy. I then uploaded the png for the edge cut. And………..

the CNC broke my heart by cutting an arc across the board, breaking a couple traces in the process. Nothing that some surgery couldn’t fix, but disappointing nonetheless. After some discussion with Claire, we realized this was because the dpi of the edge cut file was too low. For some reason uploading to mods scaled the DPI of this file in particular down to 99.

After we fixed the DPI to 1000, the cut behaved more or less as expected, but the left edge of the traces got cut off, and the mill left a ton of empty space on the right-side. I didn’t think much of it at that time.

Mill Attempt 2

I decided to redo the board since I figured remaking it would be easier than performing surgery on the damaged board. The traces milled well again, but the edge cuts messed up once more, even though I changed it to a sharp rectangle and increased the area considerably.

I realized later that I had to “lock” the resolution in gerber2img before uploading the edge cut gerber. Leo also helped me realize that my footprint for the xiao likely didn’t have sufficient pad size for the part to sit on - I was using a footprint from digikey’s library file.

I made these changes but unfortunately did not get an opportunity to use the mill again because of traffic. Next week it is then!

Comeback!

After a couple of weeks, I finally got some time to redo the board. I was able to successfully mill, solder and test the onboard button on the board and use it to control the onboard LED. A proud moment indeed!

MAKE SURE TO UPLOAD ALL GERBERS IN GERBER2IMG, THEN LOCK RESOLUTION AND ORIGIN!!!!! THEN REUPLOAD EACH GERBER INDIVIDUALLY AFTER RESOLUTION AND ORIGIN LOCK.