Electronics Production

Milling

Although I'm technically a student in ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING and computer science, I've never actually made any computer parts. I was initially a big overwhlemed to start this process, so a few students and I worked together. We were very scared to break the end mills, but ended up doing ok. We applied two long strips of double sided tape to the board to attatch it to the sacrificial layer. In our first effort to use the mill to cut the traces, our end mill was not close enough to the board at the start.

As you can see in the photo above, the milling was not deep (or uniform) enough. So we made another attempt that worked much better. We also added the outline using a 32-bit end mill.

With some vacuuming, it looked quite good.

Soldering

As will be commonplace in this class, I had no ideas what I was doing. I'm a bad engineer, and I've never soldered anything before. The first step, before even turning the soldering tools on is to get the pieces to solder and check the setup. I had no idea how important this would be. The pieces were very small.

We were told to solder the "hardest" pieces first. I.e. the pieces that were the most difficult. We were instructed that the ATiny45 was the most difficult, and it was. I had solder and re-solder this part many times to get it right. The copper braid became my best friend.

The second hardest part (I felt) was the pin header. Some people said we should do this part last, but I did it second. It was much easier than the ATiny45, but I still have to lift solder and re-solder parts.

After finishing these "tough parts" we moved from the inside to the outside, bottom to top. The last part to solder were the USB teeth, which I thought was the easiest part. I'm sure this is not the most graceful piece of electronics, but I'm satisified.

Testing