Intro Link to heading
This post comes as a continuation of the one from last week. There are certain moments that drive home how huge the difference between design and actual manufacturing of electronics is.
My design from last week obviously overlooked a couple of design rules that together compounded into failure.
List of mistakes Link to heading
I firstly forgot to make the copper line thick enough so that they wouldn’t accidentally peel off the board.
Then, I thought that I would be able to use resistors and leds similar enough in size to what we have in stock. Unfortunately, the difference was not within the error margin so I had to improvise.
My improvisations consisted of using bigger leds and resistors not meant for pcbs, but rather for larger devices. This resulted in a lot of extra labour for me (as expected it is quite to difficult to solder pieces of the wrong size in)
This leads to my final mistake, which was tossing the finished product in my bag so that I could later test it. The too big resistors and leds were sticking out and were quite exposed and that led to the connections failing and them falling off.
Only two of the resistors and one of the leds survived to its final destination.
Conclusion Link to heading
But is the circuit usable? The answer is still a “barely” because in my haste to replace my desired resistor with something else that would maybe fit, I grabbed one orders of magnitude stronger that what I had originally envisioned. This leads to the LED’s light being somewhere between invisble and barely visible.