I heard that this week was going to be challenging and it lived up to its reputation. I found Eagle not so user-friendly and the first few hours I spent learning the software somewhat frustrating. After all, this is the normal learning curve for most complex software. Eventually I got the hang of it, although I made several mistakes that were not evident until milling, prompting me to update my designs along the way.

The first mistake I made was not checking the design rules concerning the minimum distance between components/traces on the board. This resulted in a couple boards with traces merged together, rendering them useless. I also could have made better use of the grid in Eagle, which you can adjust for varying degrees of granularity. At first, I did not realize that the grid settings were responsible for components snapping into place at times and refusing to do so at others.

After finally tracing a proper board without any shorts, the next series of mistakes occurred as I tried milling the outline that separated the board from the rest of the material. I ended up cutting straight through my first board. I realized that the dpi of the oulitne, which I made in Photoshop, was 72 compared to the 1500 of the board. After updating the DPI something strange happend. Instead of milling the entire outline, the machine only drilled a hole at each corner. Huh? Finally, I relized that the outline was simply too thin and the mod wasn't picking it up. After increasing the outline width from 20px to 60px, it worked just fine.

Luckily, after so much hassle in the design and milling processes, the soldering and programming went off without a hitch.

Download Files