Electronics Design
For this week's assignment we had to redraw the echo hello-world board, a button and LED (with current-limiting resistor),
check the design rules, make it, and test it.
To do this I used Eagle by Autodesk. As I was not familiar with designing circuit boards by scratch, I spent a lot of time scanning
tutorials to understand the function of each component of the circuit board. The tutorials I found really helpful were both text-based
and video-based and are the following:
Sparkfun_How to read a schematic
Sparkfun PCB basics
Recitation
Eagle tutorial
All about circuits
Autodesk Eagle_Getting started
Autodesk Eagle_Schematic Design
After downloading and installing Eagle, I imported the library we were provided with named fab.lbr.
I created a new schematic by right clicking on the "Untitled project" tab and selecting "Schematic".
Before starting designing my circuit board, I added all the components I would need by using the Add tool.
I drew my first circuit board by using the Net tool to create connections between each component.
Next, I used the erc tool to check if there were any mistakes in my connections.
I saw that there were many warnings referring to nets overlapping with pins and empty resistor values. I therefore had to
redesign my circuit board.
I generated the board design by clicking on the Generate/switch to board tool to check what my connections looked like. The
conncetions were not clean and I therefore tried to redesign the connections again. I changed the position of some components in the
board design but I didn't reach any better results.
I redesigned my schematic hoping to fix the connections issue but I realized that was not the way to do it.
As I wasn't sure how to do it, I checked a tutorial showing that the 'post-processing' of the schematic design should be done in the
board design environment. As I spent most of the week studying about circuit boards, there wasn't much time left for the milling and programming
of my board. This is something I will explore after Week 5 class.