Week 4

"Get good at one thing at a time." -Taili

This week I ambitiously attempted to design a star-shaped PCB that included LEDs and one button.

I began by looking online at inspo boards and YouTube tutorials. Without much thought I immediately jumped into trying to recreate a board from YouTube in EasyEDA which is not Eagle, SVGPCB, nor KiCAD. After many hours of redesiging this board in the program I realized it was too complex for me and I would not have support for debugging if I did end up printing it.

So I switched back to Eagle and followed my notes from recictations, looked at what was on the website and what others were doing. I figured I could have all the same components as the simple echo hello world boards, but in a seemingly complex shape so that it looks cool.

This is the point where my difficulties truly kicked in. The components were a tangled mess and I didn't know a better way to route them other than use a billion resistors as jumpers. I also added 5 LEDS to one pin on the microcontroller using one resistor which I know now is a big no no. I moved things around again so that the each LED connects to one pin and one resistor on the SAMD11C. Thankfully, with the help of my section mates (Taili) and Quentin, I was able to route my components in a way that made sense with my star shape and in a way that they work lol.

I was finally able to print assured that it would work (according to Quentin).

Printing was a disaster after another disaster. Each mistake took so much time to correct and reprint. PRO TIP: if you're milling a weirdly shaped PCB, please orient your copper board correctly. Eventually I was left with a super cute board that I couldn't finish soldering nor programming. (Thank you for your company and support Tyler and Claire).

This week was incredibly strenuous for me and I don't have much to show for it. The board looks cool but that's about it. I encountered difficulties at every step of this process. Especially when it came to laying out the design in eagle and making sense of the components. I spent about 30 hours (maybe more) in the fablab this week. I learned a ridiculous amount.