In order to "practice" for my final project, I decided to use a motor as my output device this week. Decided to go simple as well and just use a DC motor, which is possibly what I'll use for the final project due to its speed, simplicity, and cheapness (though I might decide later on to switch to a brushless DC motor instead). I decided to pretend as though this was something in and of itself, so I called it a spinning fan.
At this point, I come to terms with the fact that when this class says to "redesign" a board, that basically entails me just manually copying the sample board trace for trace with some minor adjustments; it's hard to get creative with routing, and I've really first-hand experienced the frustration and beauty of routing on a board as a puzzle. This doesn't mean I'm good at it, though, and there are only so many configurations to route things wisely.
Soldering took a while, but I eventually had my board. Again, I basically just reused Neil's code (it's not like I was looking for anything in particular other than movement from the motor), once again changing pin assignments and minor discrepancies between what my Arduino IDE thought was valid and invalid syntax.