Week 4: Draw and Make your own Board

PART I | Drawing

  1. schematic design

    I used Eagle for the drawing of board. I loaded in the libarary for fablab and picked out all the parts that I want.

    I layed all the parts referencing a previous board, adding in a LED light (with a resistor) and a push button.

    Most of my connection lines were drawn without planning, so they are very messy at this point.

  2. turning into a board

    Then I went into the board view, with all the physical dimension and positions of the parts.

    Again, I arrange the parts referencing an already made board, trying to avoid intersecting lines.

  3. routing

    Basing off from the construction lines provided, I began routing.

    Some of the routes were drawn in wierd angle, so I need to drag and fix some of the routes to eliminate redundancy.

  4. design rules

    I loaded the design rules file in and went through the checking process.

    Many error for 'airwire' showed up, but I could not figure out how to delete them.

    For the clearance error, I tried to reroute, but this is the optimum route I can get, so I just ignored the error.

  5. exporting png

    On the milling layer, I used the polygon tool to draw the outline for the board.

    Then, I resize the milling bed and export the traces and outline layers seperately as two pngs.

PART II | Making

  1. milling

    Following the same procedure as week 2, I milled my boards on two different CNC machines in CBA shop.

    I first milled it on the less popular machine, but the board ended up with left over copper that are not suppose to be there.

    Then I milled again on the other popular machine, but the routing lines become fuzzy and almost broken (probably the endmill is worn out).

  2. soldering & programming

    I cleaned up some of the extra coppper on my first board and decided to go with it.

    Soldering is even harder this time, mostly because I drew my board too tight (1.5" by 1.5").

    I gathered all the parts together and began soldering.

    Then I connect my board to the computer and tried to program it.

    I failed programming due to connection problems, which means either my board is not milled properly or my soldering is not doing well.

    I run out of time to remake another board.

    I feel really sad that my board did not say hello world to me, but I will try to make it work next time.