Group assignment: We attended Philipo’s training as a group, we could see how the machine operates and got familiar with websocket and the milling machine. We characterized the cut depth, coordenates and different milling points, we got familiar with the offset process of the milling and did a couple of tryouts. We proceeded to mill the boards the next day, we thought we had followed the process but the milling machine wasn’t going all the way through the board, we tried playing with the depth parameters but it turned out the same way for over 5 times.

Eventually Philipo came to give another training and we realized we were not clicking the mill traces button in order for it to refresh, after this process we also realized the sacrificial layer was not completely flat and that was why our boards were not cutting properly. After other attempts we were finally able to cut our pieces correctly, we did several boards in case something went wrong with them.

Soldering was a little bit challenging but with patience and practice I think it could be a very nice thing to do, even therapeutically.
It is really important to be very organized with the pieces, in my case, I taped all of the elements of the board to a piece of paper, then had an already soldered chip with me and also had the pictures from Brian’s document right besides me.
I got some tips from other classmates and TA’s on how to solder and I found these spetially practical: 1- Clear the table, only the necessary stuff, sit down in a comfortable position, relax, put some music and BREATHE. 2- Use the microscope, if it is too uncomfortable, use the magnifying devices, they help a lot and improve precision 3- Put double tape underneath the board so that it doesn’t move anywhere. This will help to control the tools and the workspace 4- Work in the direction of the tweezers, you can change the direction of your board according to the accommodation or direction of the pieces so it is more comfortable to work the tweezers. 5- Work with both hands at the same time 6- Fix the pieces by first putting a soldering point in one of the extremes, then placing the piece on top with the tweezers and heating that soldering again so ot is fixed when you want to solder the other pieces. 7- Take breaks and be patient.

Be sure you bridged the J1 header, I didn’t get the red LED because I hadn’t bridged it correctly. I got a little bit of trouble with the programming because I don’t know much about this subject but eventually I got help from classmates.