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Computer Prototyping - Day 5

Friday Most of Friday was spent finishing and proofreading PCB designs, and organizing the fabrication of the PCBs. Much of the time consisted of looking over final PCB designs in the Fritzing design client; ensuring that the traces did not short each other, and the components has adequate accommodations to properly fit within the working board environment. The other part of the day was consumed browsing different PCB manufacturers, and selecting one that would enable a weekend turnaround, as well as being within budget. Such a company was not found however, and we resolved to fabricating our own PCBs in house, as well as sending our designs to an overseas European manufacturing facility for later development. This configuration not only allowed us to gain experience in the PCB manufacturing process, but provided us with a professionally made base for our instrument prototypes. This video was taken whilst running the CNC machine to drill the necessary vias for the PCB boards. 
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Computer Prototyping - Day 8

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   Wednesday     On Wednesday we finished wiring our custom made PCB's. Most people's didn't work and ended up deciding to wait for the professionally made PCB's to come. In the afternoon, we worked on our presentation for next Friday when all the A terms present. Below are pictures of Charlie and Juan's PCB's.
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Day 7

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I have been in attending the Prototyping with Custom PCBs and Microcontrollers A-Term from home in distance learning. I spent most of the day today practicing soldering and building my prototype. My project is an 8x8 LED Arduino asteroids game. This is a simple game using the MAX72XX LED-Matrix as a display, two micro switches as buttons, and an active buzzer for a sound effect. Here is a picture of the breadboard and Arduino: The next step was to prototype it using a shield and soldering the wires in place. This would allow me to create a portable game that does not require a breadboard. I spent most of the day soldering, which proved to be very frustrating and difficult. I carefully used the iron to put a small amount of solder on the tip of the stripped wire. Then, I heated the spot where I wanted to attach the wire with the soldering iron. Next, I place the tip of the wire to the board with the soldering iron on top, and carefully melted solder onto the tip of the iron. It was an a
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Computer Prototyping - Day 6

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  Connor Kissack Today in class we approached a new path; to self-assemble our own PCBs. This was because the ones we ordered weren't going to arrive that the time we needed them. Primarily, we needed to drill holes in our copper plates with holes that were listed on our PCB layouts. This took some effort as our machine needed some fixes to get it to function. Additionally, we needed to translate our drill files (these listed the desired location for the drill holes) into G-code for the machine since it would not function solely with the information listed in our drill files themselves. This took us a length of time as it was necessary to get everything sorted out predominately. Once this was finalized, we began to drill our copper plates. After all of our plates were drilled, we needed to sand then clean these drilled plates. This did not take too much effort. When all of our plates were completely cleaned and sanded, we needed to wrap it for the day because our next day was going
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Computer Prototyping - Day 4

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 Connor Kissack On Thursday, March 26th, we completed all of our personal protoboards (this includes our code and our self-placed circuits on our breadboard). The next step in our project was to create our own PCB layouts. This task was rather time consuming and tedious as we had to connect wires from the parts we used in our protoboards to sockets located on the microcontroller board--this model is specifically known as the Mega 2560 (AGK). Working through this was difficult since we had a cluster of wires being used to make our projects function. When we placed each wire to its correct position on our PCB we needed to start organizing the wires so that each did not touch each other. This required us to make "vias", to bring wires to the lower layer, and to keep some at the top layer. Additionally, we also had to make breakpoints so other wires could avoid touching one another. Most of us got this done, but for some of us we needed to use the morning of last day of working o
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Computer Prototyping - Day 3

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Isaak Townsend Wednesday was finishing up the code for our programs, which was mainly getting the little bugs in them fixed. The wiring for our circuit boards was a mess but they worked, translating the wires to Fritzing is a tedious task but we need to do that in order for us to be able to send it to a manufacturer. In most of the projects there are potentiometers and all are using some kind of visual display. All of us had some problems with adapting the code to fit their needs and the occasional problem with wiring. That concludes Wednesday  
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Computer Prototyping - Day 2

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  Charlie Brisch Mr. Beradino Computer Prototyping with PCBs March 23rd, 2021 Today in class we worked on building our arduino’s and prototyping with our breadboards. I had taken apart an old controller I brought in so I could use the shell as a “project box” for my PCB, arduino, and components. I got my prototype to function after looking for new code multiple times because none of the code would work the way I needed it to.
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