Electronics Design
In Which I Get By with a Little Help from my Friends
Look. Any of you future class takers who happens to stuble onto my page - Listen to me now. Do not. Do NOT. Take two weeks off in the middle of class. Probably don't even take one week off! It is a bad idea and you will be very sad and frustrated.
How do I know this? welll....
![](images/week4/grand_canyon.jpg)
Electronics Design part 2
Luckily I wasn't totally unfamiliar with how Eagle worked. However, I was not as functional in it as I thought I was. I am super grateful that Daniel and Lins were at the lab on Monday, and willing to share their knowledge.
![](images/week4/traces3.jpg)
So, cool. Got my board designed and laid out, feeling accomplished. Also hungry and tired, so I decided to call it a day and wrap up on Tuesday. (Never do this.)
Tuesday started out... well, alright. I was having trouble figuring out how to use the older milling machine in Harvard's fab lab, but eventually got it moving. Hey, check out this fancy thing!
No, really - take a close look. A few shorts are obvious - a few are not-so-obvious, and a result of me not having left enough space between traces and pads in the board design process.
![](images/week4/shorted_board.jpg)
So, in keeping with my habit of making questionable choices this week, instead of redesigning and re-milling, I took an xacto to the areas that were not supposed to connect. This went mostly fine, until the very last which slipped and ripped out the nearby trace entirely.
![](images/week4/broken_board.jpg)
I think I startled one of the other guys in the lab with my swearing.
Realizing that it was pushing 9, I hadn't had dinner, and still had an hour commute home, I decided to call it a night. Sometimes, reasonable decisions pile up and leave you in a place you didn't expect. This time, it's me, totally unprepared for class. But so it goes.