This week’s assignment was less open-ended. We had to make an in-circuit programmer as decribed in the instructions here.

After the training session, a group of us decided to team up and produce 4 boards at once, saving time on configuing the mill and switching out bits, and solving the problem of who gets to use the mill first. We used the 1/64” endmill to mill the traces and the 1/32” endmill to mill the outline.

This was successful, and in a little under an hour, the four of us all had shiny new boards, ready to solder components onto.

Documenting the milled boards.
I forgot to take a picture of the plain board. Oops.

Turns out the components are tiny. Like realllly tiny. Having not really soldered before, I found placing the components to be difficult, as my hands would shake. However, I soon got the hang of it and was on my way! May my joints be smooth and shiny enough.

Next, I had to load the program onto the PCB. In order to do this, I needed to pad the USB connector with extra solder because they were a little thin, and create a bridge connecting the V_{cc} to the V_{prog} pin on the ISP header so that the board can be programmed. Afterwards, I severed this connection to turn the board back into a programmer.



Files

fts_mini_cut.png
fts_mini_traces.png