Documentation
PCB Design
Last week I had already made the PCB and put it into the 3D modelling. However when I went to office hours
I learned that there were a few steps I had to make sure happened. I had to make sure that the minimum trace
and minimum trace width was 0.4mm. I then had to run a DRC to see if I had any issues. Apart from it having multiple
issues I had to redo it all over again so that it was not with nano but instead with a seeed xiao esp32s3.
EECS Try 1
This is going a little bit into the past but before I switched everything over to a seeed xiao i went to the EECS
lab to mill it with the Othermill but then I ran into an error where it said I didn't have anything on my gerber files.
The Cutting
I am currently in the archsops trying to cut a PCB for the first time by myself. I have the
mods open,downloaded the gerbers,switched them over to pngs and I am ready to cut.
I already zeroed
the origin and to zero the z you unscrew and drop the endmill by hand. Unfortunately my first try the PCB didn't
fit into the copper board that I had. In the second try for some reason the traces were being cut wayyy too much
and they almost all broke and then the board itself got untaped from the overlay so I had to stop the entire process.
This is now my third try and I am hoping that it will go well this time. I made sure that all my traces are a minimum of 0.4mm
and the distance is also a minimum of 0.4mm. I also moved the copper over to the other less used of the overlay
and made sure to use a lot more strips of tape. andddd it didn't work. The bit is cutting in some places
but not necessarily all the places.
I think it might have something to do with the overlay not being flat
or maybe i got bubbles and my piece just isn't flat? I think I am going to go EECS tomorrow and try to make it there.
To try to fox it I stopped it and didn't move the origin but made the z a little bit deeper and maybe hopefully that
will work and resent the file and I am currently cutting it right now. It WORKED. Now for some reason it decided to start drilling
the holes in the wrong location?? It seems that when I rendered the cuts it was on the wrong size board.
Thank God that the holes did not cut through the traces. I was able to fix it and now I have the PCB! I have to go solder it tomorrow.
Soldering
So I went in to the EECS lab today because I could not find solder paste in the architecture shop. I started to
use the heat gun but I think I ended up slightly burning the solder. It is apparently supposed to be ~300F. Apart from
that I ran into an issue with my LCD screen. Since the LCD is through-hole I was not able to solder it in normally and i had
to offset it a bit to be able to solder it to the PCB but then I tried to turn it on but apparently I forgot to draw a trace
to the LED meaning I gave it no power so now it won't turn on.
Updated PCB
So I decided that while I was at it I might as well check to make sure all the LCD connections are working so I
updated my breadboard and verything worked as long as the LCD LED pin was powered by 5V so I was so ready to
put it into the schematic but then one of my traces is stuck no matter how much I try I can't get it to
it's right pin. OH MY GOD. It took me at least half an hour of staring at the PCB but I was finally able to
figure out a way for all the pins to connect and I can finally mill it again!!
It was actually able to turn on this time but when I tried to push the code from arduino I ran into an error
with the libraries and it wasn't able to push the code and I have honestly no idea how to fix that issue.
SOOOOO apparently some of my wiring is wrong and I have to remake the PCB again. Apart from that we downloaded
a different TFT library with Adafruit and I have to switch over all my code and hope that it works apart from redesigning
the PCB.