Danny Griffin HTMAA 2023

Week 04 :: Electronics Design

How do we plan a circuit?

1. Group Assignment:

Testing the test equipment.

Responsive image — Working with Mateo Fernandez, Nasibe Nur Dundar Arifoglu, Niklas Hagemann, Simon Lesina-Debiasi, Alex Htet Kyaw, and Merve Akdogan we set out to gain some debugging intuition using the RPL's equipment.

To learn some basic debugging, I brought my simple OLED breadboard from week 02.

At first, we learned to adjust the settings of the multimeter to detect current and voltage.

We also tried using the multimeter to measure the resistance of a resistor. In this case, 100 ohms.

Gathering around my breadboard, we confirmed that the power supply of from the usb cable was 5V, as we would expect in this very simple circuit.

Our more interesting findings came when we started to learn about the oscilloscope, which we tried connecting to different combinations of pins.

Eventually, we realized we could connect to the SDA pin to visualize the serial communication of the display.

Aside from adjusting the knobs to change the visualization parameters, we also learned that the plot can be output onto an SD card.

Through trial and error, we started to develop an intuition for adjusting the waveforms.

Waveform display in action.

2. Use an EDA tool to design a development board

Starting with zero knowledge of making circuits, I had no idea how to approach what I actually want to create. Instead, I decided to start from the most accessible tutorial I found, which was this ATTiny412 development board.

Learning to load libraries, to ensure I'm working with relevant symbols and footprints.

Assigning footprints is the crucial link between Schematic editor and PCB editor.

I was surprised to find the so-called "rat's nest" which first appears when you switch to the PCB editor.

After learning the basics of the interface, I found it quite intuitive to drag and connect the wires.

At this stage, I was starting to get some sense of design rules. Even though I was following a tutorial, I didn't plan out the spacing carefully. There's a lot of wasted space in this layout.

Output File: I also was surprised to learn that Kicad will not automatically notify you if you overlap your edges and wires. Here, when I first exported an .svg file, I noticed that I have a wire falling off of the board.

3. Concept design - Next step schematics

At the start of this week, I was thinking about the eventual schematic design of my final project, and I couldn't even conceptualize where a PCB would exist.

Now that I have some basic understanding of Kicad, I'd like to design my own PCB to connect an ESP-32C with a vibrating disc motor and OLED display.