Week 4
![PS Error](../assets/images/week4/img.jpg )
This week was about making a even cooler board and making sure it could talk to us! Considering that my board from the previous week's board was not all that impressive in terms of functionality, I decided to begin by printing out a cooler board, one with an OLED, a more powerful processor (the SAMD21), which would support more powerful tasks in future weeks, along with supporting the basic LED and button necessary for this week. Beginning with a complex design was probably in contradiction with our design spiral, but I was excited to dip my toes into the process! - and I learned a lot during the process.
![PS Error](../assets/images/week4/img_1.jpg )
I began by developing a valid board, working to have a OLED display, and the processor to power it; I also structured it to be powered by a USB. The board also had an LED and a button for specific functionality for the microcontroller. Designing the board was a bit of a challenge, especially in understanding the datasheet, setting up the pin connections and necessary circuits (with resistors and capacitors), and optimizing the traces, but then came milling.
![PS Error](../assets/images/week4/img_2.jpg )
For milling, we began by converting the chip design of my board to a png such that the milling pipeline could preprocess my image, which required us to fill in vias & holes in Adobe Illustrator, fix some image preprocessing issues, and do a double pass of the board to cut traces and then cut out the board. I also tried to cut the holes with a smaller bit, since I thought it would be able to go through, but the 1/64th bit was too short to go all the way through, which resulted in the cone structures to burrow through the board. :( Thankfully the board was still functional, so we used an external drill to make the via holes.
![PS Error](../assets/images/week4/img_3.jpg )
Then I soldered everything onto the board, which took a while with the high density of small pads, along with the via holes. I also had to solder the OLED display, which was a bit of a challenge, but I was able to hone my soldering skills in the process (maybe to a bit of a perfectionist degree).
![PS Error](../assets/images/week4/img_4.jpg )
Then, I loaded a Arduino Feather bootloader onto the SAMD21, which allowed me to program the board using PlatformIO, which is a super nice VSCode extention that supersedes Arduino's IDE (and I personally like using better). Once the bootloader was loaded using the programmer (that we made two weeks ago) I could program it like any other Arduino board and got it to register button presses and toggle the LED on and off! This was super satisfying to get working :D
![PS Error](../assets/images/week4/img_5.jpg )
![Daniel lewis](../assets/images/avatar-1.png)