Week 4 - Electronic design

  • Idea search engine

    For this week's assignment I wanted to play around with aesthetics of pcbs and make sort of an artwork.
    I thought of doing some pcb-inspired jewelry (and both Google and Pinterest have a lot of random aesthetic pcbs in resin).
    Another point of inspiration was a neopixel loop earrings" which I have seen someone in real life wearing (a while ago).
    LEDs are cool, but they are not at all the cap of what a microcontroller can power.
    So I went to talk to ChatGPT. On the left is a little snapshot from the conversation.
    What caught my attention was microphone, speaker, temperature, camera, bluetooth, WiFi, Solar panels.
    I got very excited about the solar panels, but was discouraged about their efficiency. I will come back to it in future projects.
    And the winner was making a parrot earring that can record sound or play sound (same as a parrot would).
    Just think about it - a cute bird almost sitting on your shoulder that can play anything you record.

  • Eagle (Fusion) process

    For making a layout I had two objectives - functionality and visual shape.
    (Fast forward hours of trying to understand how Eagle and generally electonics works together with Maaya and Anthony) on the right is a tentative wiring of the scheme.
    Going through documentation and datasheet for each element was more confusing than I expected, but it got more clear over time.
    It uses XIAO ESP32-S3 as a main microcontroller and integrates speaker, microphone, and an LED.
    Once everything is wired - it's time to draw.
    I didn't get to drawing it my hand (maybe should), but just by manually drawing it in Fusion didn't look great at first.
    What I tried later was figuring out how to draw curves, and actually shaping the bird into pcb. It took me forever, but hey, it looks pretty.

  • Result

    Here is a result of the work! Note from electronics manufacturing week - one little problem about this board is that one of the zero resistors has to go under the usb-c port, which was impossible to see just from layout; there is an easy jumper wire fix for it, or remodelling and reshaping the bird again (no, thank you).
    Thanks! Stay tuned for more making adventures!
    Here is a Fusion Archive brd file of my design.

  • Acknowledgements

    Thank you to Maaya and Anthony for helping me with electronics and Fusion!
    Thank you to ChatGPT for the inspiration!
    Thank you to Github Copilot for helping with writeup!
    One future project would be making it an earring - but that is challenging from different perspective.

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