this week's assignment was to use an EDA tool to design a development board to interact and communicate with an embedded microcontroller. i elected to go with eagle for my EDA tool, as i've been using fusion for CAD so far.
i also chose to use the xiao rp2040, as it's what i used during embedded programming week. the one tricky bit became picking the right version of the board from the fab library, but i got there via process of elimination.
next, i learned to add components. the drag-and-drop interface of adding compoents from the library is tedious and slow, so i wound up using the command line and found it more efficient. i also learned to "net" the pieces together, i.e actually connecting them.
i wanted to keep things simple for my first board, so i only added one additional component: a single LED. i followed my notes from class / recitation in terms of placing the resistor and LED properly in the circuit.
i then moved from the schematic to the PCB file, where i had to adjust the components into logical placements, and add a polygon on the layer containing the board itself (this is the blue area).
and voila! here is the finished product. nothing fancy, but it does fit all the parameters of the week's assignment.
i also wanted to check my work Wednesday morning, but didn't think i could get a TF to respond in time. luckily gpt4 takes images in prompts, and told me i designed my circuit correctly!
