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This is my make-through for the week's assignment. Grab a ساعتين جد!
PROCESS MAP
PROCESS MAP
BACKGROUND
BACKGROUND
I adore electronics and tech stuff to be honest so this week was like a wild journey for me! We have learned how to design our own PCB and how to solder SMD and through hole components and we were asked to design our own dev board!
So what are you waiting for ? LETS START OUR JOURNEY
OBJECTIVE #1: Soldering Our Own Arduino Board
OBJECTIVE #1: Soldering Our Own Arduino Board
Trial #1 (Successful): Successful Attempt
Trial #1 (Successful): Successful Attempt
Our last meet up in fablab we have got our customized Arduino Board and we needed to solder the components on the board and actually for me it was like a piece of cake as i really really i love soldering since i was like 14 years old.
To solder properly you need to follow those steps
Step 1: Clean your PCB with isopropyl alcohol to remove any any oil, paint, wax, etc.
Step 2: Heat up your soldering iron to a suitable temp to melt the solder.
Step 3: Hold the soldering iron like a pen, near the base of the handle.
Step 4: Heat the Pads, not the solder.
Step 5: Slowly apply the soldering wire on the pads
Step 6: Solder will flow into and around well-heated connections, apply enough amount of solder till you make a good connection.
And voila you've got nice and sweet soldered board!
For this process i have not faced any issues fortunately, So lets head to the next disaster :'D
OBJECTIVE #2: Trying to design my own ATTINY44 Board
OBJECTIVE #2: Trying to design my own ATTINY44 Board
Trial #1 : 1st Design
Trial #1 : 1st Design
In this week's assignment we were asked to design our attiny44 board with a given schematic and this is literally like my first time to design, fabricate, solder a board from my scratch and i really believe that it is better than using breadboards.
Schematic Design:
My first step was to add the fab's eagle library then i have started adding each part i needed from sparkfun's library and the fab library after that i have started searching on google for more inspirational resources for the design and then i saw this so i thought it would be such a great idea to add a USB porn on the PCB itself and luckily the footprint was available on sparkfun and fab library.
So after adding each component i have started naming each component pinout due to the schematic provided.
after finishing the schematic i have switched to the board mode.
Board Design:
Set DRC Rules to 14mil.
Draw the outline of the PCB .
Set a Polygon and assign its function to GND and set an isolate value of 24.
Start routing things up and after all routing process i have exported the Gerber files
Exporting Files:
I have opened gerbv and set the colors of drills, copper top, profile to black and exported them as .PDF file.
after that i have opened GIMP and imported each PDF and set the DPI to 1000 and set the image mode to indexed and inverted the profile, copper top colors to follow up with the machine itself process then i have exported the drills, profile, top copper as a PDF format.
Testing Process:
After exporting the PNG files from GIMP i headed to fabmodules.org and set the import format to .PNG, Output format > Roland mil (.rml), Process > PCB traces (1/64) then clicked on Calculate button but the first issue i have faced that the traces were incomplete so i have reduced the tool diameter from 0.4 to 0.35 mm and the number of the offsets to 2 and that would totally decrease the size of the pads
Fabrication Process:
i headed to fablab and started using the machine and set the X,Y Coordinates
i used the UP and Down Buttons to set the Z axis distance then i have clicked on zjog button to lift up the drill bit a bit of the bed and calculated again the set the speed to 4mm/s which is a bit slow but i needed to get real smooth traces and started to send to the machine to start the milling but the first issue i have faced that the Z axis distance was a bit up and it was barely touching the PCB surface but i have kept it going to check if the whole traces gonna show up on the board.
And fortunately the traces was smooth so i have lowered the the distance again the start engraving on the board but after finishing the process the traces got shifted and the reason for that still unknown.
So i repeated the whole process again but this time the traces was such a mess! and that's because i have set the tool diameter to 0.35 and the drill bit diameter was 0.4 mm and the number of the offsets was a bit low and the traces design was 13mil (0.33mm) only
after finishing the traces i have imported the drills, profile files but this time instead of selecting PCB traces (1/64) i have chosen PCB outline (1/32) and calculated again and set my X,Y Coordinates and started the cutting process unfortunately the outline and the drills were shifted too!
Problem: incomplete traces, Shifted drills, Profile.
Potential Solution: Try to reset the machine's memory and re- route all the traces of the PCB
Trial #2 (Successful): 2nd attempt
Trial #2 (Successful): 2nd attempt
Attempt #3 of Fabrication:
After the 2 attempts of trying to fabricate the PCB i have re routed all the traces to 21,22 mil (0.5mm) to make sure that it'll fully show up in the fab modules without changing anything in the tool diameter or offsets settings.
Then i have passed through the whole exporting and generating the PNG files again but the good thing here that after importing the files in the fab modules all the traces were showing up without changing anything in the settings and that because the trace width was 0.42 and the tool diameter was 0.4 !
Setting up the Roland MDX-20 for PCB Milling Process:
first thing i have cleaned the bed to remove any excess dust and got my plain PCB and a Scotch tape then a layer of a double sided tape to make the PCB stick on the wooden bed of the machine.
Then i have used the small Allen key that is attached in the machine and installed the 0.4mm V bit end mill and set my X,Y Coordinates, Z distance then calculate, send to the machine and voila! all the traces became smooth as i wanted after the re-routing process the next step that i have removed the V bit and installed the ball nose bit then changed the process to PCB outline (1/32) in order to make the drills, Profile then calculate, Send to the machine and they turned out really great!
After that i have cleaned the PCB with isopropyl alcohol to remove any excess dust on the PCB.
Soldering Time:
i have set the temp of the soldering iron station to 420 Celsius then i have cleaned the tip to make sure it is nice and clean.
and opened my board design to follow up with the resistor values etc...
then i have started soldering by adding a solder on the pad and put the SMD components on the top of the pads then heat them up agaain and it became nice and attached.
one of the nice TIPS i was proud while doing it was the pin header because we apparently did not have a SMD pin headers so we needed to use a through hole one so i thought like it would be silly attaching the Pin headers on the other side of the board! so i have started by bending the legs of the pin headers using a long nose plier to make it fit on the top of the pin header's Pads
The second tip was how to make sure of the polarity of the SMD LED and it turns out the green part of the LED was the negative one and to make sure of that i have turned on the power supply and set the voltage to 3.3V and repeated the process after soldering the LEDs to make sure that i have placed the component in a right way!
After soldering all the parts together which took about 2 hours i needed to increase the thickness of the USB Port so i thought it would be such a great idea to add a bit of solder on the pads and it worked like a charm!
Last TIP and it is really a genius tip when i was soldering a 0 Ohm resistor to connect the GNDs together unfortunately under the SMD resistor was 2 traces and i wanted to avoid any short circuit problem so i thought it would be a great idea to isolate them so i got a piece of Kapton Tape ( a tape with nice resistance to high temperatures) and cut it to fit on the top of the 2 trace after that i have put my resistor and soldered it and used the multimeter to make sure if there is any issues of the traces or if it is connected together.
TESTING Process:
To test the board i have turned on the bench power supply and set the voltage to 4.5V and attached the crocodile clip on the ground and the other one on the VCC port and finally it's WORKING!!
then i have set up my USBasp Drivers and attached the ISP header on my board and was working great so the next step was to upload a test code to make sure that the CHIP is not damage but after uploading the code nothing is working and the LED is not Blinking so after some searching and troubleshooting it turns out that i have assigned the wrong pins in the code after looking at Attiny Core's Github so after correcting the pins it was working, and to be honest watching a thing you have built from scratch is totally amazing!
Amazing ha ?
Pin headers after bending them.
After soldering the 0 Ohm resistor.
Kapton Tape on the traces.
Free Energy :'D
Wohooo
CONCLUSION
CONCLUSION
What I learned this week is...
This week we have learned the different types of electronic components packages and how to solder the SMD, Through hole components and how to fabricate the PCB using the CNC machine and how to design a proper, Working PCB and it was a very exciting week actually!
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