Introduction

This assignment is the start of what is my big fear: electronics. Luckily, the assignment was not too big or challenging in other ways.

Assignment:

Process

Milling

Above a tutorial video for the PCB milling. Watch it and follow the steps carefully. Below you can find the original milling files needed to mill it with mods.

Soldering

Soldering this small is a bit of a challenge. You can clearly see the progress. You can see below that the top left element is way more messily soldered than the same element on the bottom right.

For the soldering, you need the following components:

• 2x 5x2 headers
• 1x 1 µF capacitor
• 1x Atmel chip
• 1x Resistor 0 Ω
• 1x 3.3V voltage regulator

The positioning of the header doesn't matter, neither do the capacitor and the resistor. In either direction they will work. However, the orientation of the chip is really important. On the datasheet you can see the first pin has to go on the top right. The voltage regulator can only go in one direction.

A few tips for soldering:

• I would suggest practicing a bit before soldering the 'real' PCB. Kind of like warming up before running a marathon.
• Hold the soldering iron between the copper base and the component and wait till nice and warm.
• Do not use too much soldering metal.
• Use tweezers to hold components with many ends at first, solder one end and focus on the overall position instead of the soldering quality of that one end. This way the component will be stuck nicely and you'll be able to focus on the quality of the soldering. After having done a few ends well, you can correct the soldering of the first end if necessary.

Programming

Scrape the remaining solder off the USB end. Tape the back end with plastic. Connect the USB to the bootloader and to a computer (preferably Linux). Run the program.

Takeaways

A lot of things could have gone more efficiently, but overall it was not as scary as thought. Hopefully this will remain the coming weeks (I don't have high hope).