Materials:
Plan/Goal:
We are using a kit including the materials above, in order to make an oscilloscope that can measure electrical signal overtime. This is giving us practice with soldering before we jump into advanced electronics, and it gives us a basis for electronics for when we get into surface mount soldering and when we begin our personal projects.
Workflow/Building the Board:
We began creating our oscilloscope by obtaining all of our materials included in our kit with the red arduino board, and we taped all of our pieces down to a piece of paper, sorted by each individual piece by type of material and the subcategories of the materials. We labeled all of the materials to make adding the pieces a faster process when assembling our board. The instructions we were given gave a letter and number associated with every piece we were given in our kit. These letters and numbers were the corresponding space the components would go in on our red arduino board. We started by placing all of our resistors in the corresponding spaces to their letters, which was r, and their numbers, which differed with resisitors. We taped them down to keep the resistors in place without falling out, and flipped the board over to solder each of the individual legs of the resistors, and we made sure none of the parts or legs were touching or that their were solder bridges between the pieces and there was soldering covering the entire holes where the legs were placed in. We then repeated these steps for the chokes, diodes, crystal, usb socket, tact swtiches, ceramic capacitors, trasistors, resgulators, capacitor trimmers, power inductors, electroytic capacitors, power connector, pin-headers, slide switches and the BNC connector. As we soldered down all of the pieces, we used wire cutters to cut the excess of the legs of the materials off, creating a smoother and more balanced, cleaner looking bottom of our board. Then, at J2 we used a piece of excess leg from one of our reisistors in order to create a test signal ring, and we soldered it down to the board. We then had to create a short at J3, by using a small piece of wire, we were able to keep the solder on there and create the short. Then, we were able test our voltages of our board and attach our LCD board to see if the connection or board measured electrical signal overtime.
Testing and Troubleshooting After Intial Build:
We began our testing by using a multimeter to test the voltage of a 9V battery to see if it was actually 9V and would be sufficient for a power source for our oscilloscope. When we tested the battery, it was 9V and we plugged it into our power connector, and placed our LCD board on the arduino board, with all the components of the pin-headers lining up and pushed down tight to see if our board worked. The screen came up cloudy and blank, showing that it did not work, so we would have to go back and see where the problems were. We used a microscope to look more closely at our connections, to see if our components were truly soldered down and the holes were completly covered with solder and none of the solder or componets were touching. After finding a few holes that needed to be more covering the board and removing a little solder from some components because too much solder is just as bad as not enough solder, we attempted to test the board again, and it still showed the same blank screen. We decided to test or find the voltage that was coming from our board, so we plugged the battery into the power connector and held the wires to the ground of the board to see the voltage on our multimeter, it was 2.97V and it needed to be at least 3V. We needed to go back to the miscroscope and check to see any more parts that needed to be touched up or fixed, and after looking at the miscroscope and few more times and testing the voltage with different batteries, the voltage of our board remained slightly below 3V everytime we tested it. This resulted in the same blank screen, not showing the black screen with colored lines to show the electrical signals on it. We are going to use another oscilloscope in order to test the issues and troubleshoot our oscilloscope to ultimately discover the issue and get our oscilloscope runnning properly.