this week's assignment was to mill and solder the board that i designed last week. as a refresher, i made this extremely simple "hello world" level board with a XIAO RP2040, a single resistor, and an LED:
i had some issues using quentin's gerber2img file converter; troubleshooting revealed it is an issue with my browser we couldn't resolve.
so i just used the command line export in eagle to generate a png at 1000 dpi, which was sufficient:
to mill the board, i used the harvard reef's roland srm-20 and leo + claire's guidance. after confirming that my trace path looked OK...
i milled the board. i had to do two passes, since in the first, there wasn't contact between the tip and the board; but after a quick manual adjustment, it worked:
then i learned how to solder, and it was surprisingly easy to learn. with ample use of flux tape and a few failed attempts, i got the two small components on the board:
finally, i soldered on the microcontoller and wrote some C code similar to what i used during embedded programming week, referencing the XIAO about page to get the right pinout; i call my program blink-182.
and voila! uploaded the code to the completed device, and it performed as expected.
all in all, a fun and interesting week! every single step of this process was new to me, so there were definitely some stumbling blocks and looking back i really didn't accomplish anything that impressive. but i learned a ton and am excited to build on this foundation.
