Computer Prototyping - Day 4

 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 on this to tidy up our virtually completed work. Here are some photos, and information, of the projects we have worked on:







Connor: I, simply, made a functioning stopwatch that has buttons to start and stop the time. Additionally, I added a buzzer that beeps once a button is pressed.











Isaak: I made a project that measures how far away an object is using echolocation and displays the distance on an LED LCD. The distance is measured in centimeters by default however I made a button that allows you to shift between inches and centimeters. It uses a potentiometer to change the brightness of the LED LCD.










Juan: My project is a LCD clock with persistent time, along with a temperature/humidity readout module that can be toggled on and off with a button press. The sensors display values in real time, and continue to store value even if the main system loses power. Although not a core component of the main build, a potentiometer controls the visual contrast of the LCD display.











Oliver: I'm making a precise clock that can either show the time in military or it can show it in standard time. I am also trying to incorporate a timer within this. I'm using the LCD to show the time.




















Charlie: My project is building two player pong inside of an old Xbox controller. 




















Henry: My project is an 8x8 Asteroids game



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