Roulette Wheel PCB Design

For the Roulette Wheel PCB Design Project, I challenged myself to reinforce and improve my understanding of electrical systems, Boolean logic, and PCB layout to design a fun and light-hearted project. The goal was to create a system where the LEDs flashed in a circular pattern similar to the spinning of a roulette wheel, with the user being able to flick a switch and halt the system on a specific LED. This project utilized numerous skills with both digital and physical components which were documented throughout the entire process. 

More specifically, on the digital side, NI Multisim was utilized to determine the logic and the necessary components needed to accomplish the flashing circular pattern, while the Fusion electronics suite was used to design the layout of the PCB board and the placement of the logic gates and supplementary electronic components. Once the planning phase was complete, I transferred the entire system to a breadboard to test the wiring and component placement. In this stage, color-coded wiring and zip ties were essential to ensure the project remained comprehensible and streamlined. Once the breadboard achieved the desired results, the PCB layout was then transferred to a copper plate and ferric chloride was used to remove the excess copper. I then drilled vias into the PCB and soldered header pins into the board for the IC logic gates, capacitors, and LEDs. 

Overall, this project was definitely a challenge, and incorporated knowledge from many disparate aspects of electrical engineering. My main takeaway from this project is the importance of having distinct wiring to allow for troubleshooting and accessibility. While the wiring may seem convoluted, color-coding the wires made it exponentially easier to understand where mistakes were made and subsequently rectify them. The planning phase involving NI Multisim and the Fusion electronics suite was also very helpful and provided me with an avenue to completely plan out the project from start to finish which minimized wasted time and general confusion. In the future, I plan to implement the skills learned from this project into designing flight computers and recording instruments for the competition rockets and aircrafts I design.