Week 2: Making a Programmer

PART I | Testing with Milling (group work)

  1. setting up material

    First we double-sided taped the back side of copper board, and then we press it against the right bottom corner of the milling bed.

    We also use paper towel to clean any extra dirt/oil off the top surface of the board.

  2. installing endmill

    Following instructions, we install and drop the endmill to the origin.

    For z-axis, before we drop the endmill, we started with 10 and slowly edited it to 4.

  3. loading cut file

    We loaded the testfile available onine and prepared to cut after adjusting the max depth to 0.008 and single path to 0.004.

  4. milling

    It started to mill, but the first attempt did not go well due to the failure of not dropping the endmill enough.

    We vacuumed before our second attempt.

    We tried again by dropping the endmill correctly and it worked well.

PART II | Make the Board

  1. setting up

    Knowing how to use the CNC machine, now I need to cut my own board.

    I did the same setting and loaded in the scored pattern of circuit board.

  2. milling

    I started milling.

    However, when I tried to cut my back-up board, I accidentally pressed millcut instead of milltrace.

    So I redo everything again.

  3. soldering

    I collected all the parts first and labeled them.

    Then I tested soldering on some empty boards before actually soldering my board.

    During the solder session, I find it is very challenging to make sure that some of the components(i.e.LED lights) are soldered in the correct direction.

PART III | Program the Programmer

  1. red light

    I first tested to connect my board to computer through USB adapter, and it light up.

  2. programming

    Though the lED light is succesfully connected, I run into problem when I actually tried to program it.

    When I run the make flash command, it would just tell me there is initaization problem, check connection.

    Also, there is one moment when I smell something smocky, so probably the board was burnt.

    Now I will need to make another board to figure what's going on.