Week 6: Electronics Production

Group Assignment

For the group assignement the CBA section did a walk through with Quentin in the CBA electronics workshop. We learned how to use the Carvera machine. It uses little 1/64" (cutting traces) and 1/32" (board outline) endmils

Thank you Quentin! Some additional tips below

• Clamping - Fixture the board from all 4 sides and make sure you tighten them properly but don't yield the copper.
• Stock below - Make sure that you use at least 1 board below the PCB
• Flatness - A bowing board will be bad at cutting traces all the way through. Push on different areas of the boards before milling to see if they are actually flat.
• Endmills - They break really easily so be careful with them

Individual Assignment

We upload our gerber files from fusion to Gerber2Image and then we take the images and put them into Mods. After that we upload our gcode files to the carvera computer and run the program

"Upload" the file first to the mill computer before loading since the gcode needs to be saved to the mill in case of a comms error. Select your 3x3 calibation points and use the calipers to offset your cutting area to where you want to cut.

Milling time

Clean your tools!

One of my pads failed when I was soldering since I had to use this large LED :( so I directly soldered to the pin

Reflections

It works! Some learnings are that you need to find out if your components are in-stock and ALSO know where they are. I would also like to give a shoutout to Quentin for overseeing my milling at 5pm on a Friday so that I could finish the assignment before I needed to leave for a research conference.