Week 3 - Electronics Production

For my milling I used the SRM-20. I had no trouble setting it up. I did find it a bit weird how if you opened the plastic door a little to fast the machine would send out an error and you'd have to restart it but, to be honest, it was usually a 5 second hiccup so no hard feelings! One other thing that happened was that I must have not cleaned my surface well enough because the endmill was only barely cutting through the right side of the copper.

But as you can see the PCB came out just fine. The endmill was also sharp enough that no deburring was required. 

Next came soldering. I was a bit scared of it first since I didn't want to screw up my delicious new board. I realised that given the first solder is well made the rest of the solders for a given component are also going to be fine. I found this process quite therapeutic so I'm looking forward to doing more of it!

I'm happy with how the PCB turned out. I still need to test it to see if it works ok. I'll probably be doing that in the next couple of days. If I find time I would like to try a more challenging design. I was thinking of overlaying the circuits on some for of a photo... I'm still not sure what that could be though.

I also did the trace thickness test. No surprises there I guess. Maybe I should do some soldering tests on this?