electronics production

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building the FabTinyISP

i was a little intimidated starting the electronics production week, because i had never soldered or programmed a circuit board before. following the Brian tutorial turned out to be fairly straightforward, but i still encountered several debugging problems.

first, i milled the board on the roland mill MDX-20 using the mods cba server. i encountered some problems here with milling the outline because the hydraulic mechanism that moves up and down in the z-direction had reached its limit, so when trying to mill the outline, it would only milled halfway into the board. i solved this problem by setting the mill back to the origin moving the end mill up and then re-screwing the bit back down to increase allowance in the z-direction.



my completed milled board:



then, i began to solder on the components onto the PCB using Brian as a guide. (Brian was really a life saver for this project doing a great job of explaining how to do each step and what each step entailed).



i also learned a soldering technique while in the arch shop, to place the soldering tip onto the pad desired to solder and then bringing the solder closer to create an initial bed of material. then position the component desired to solder on top of the bed, and then reheat the solder below and let the component fall into the puddle and let the solder flow.

my board looked fairly good (in my opinion) after soldering all the components onto the PCB, and then i tried to plug it into the computer. another problem, because i definitely was plugging it in wrong. i had only attached the 2x3 to the Atmel-ICE and not the USB connector, which was honestly my bad.