Electronics Design
So for this week I'm going to design and mill a board with a couple of components on it. I was quite facinated by the double sided PCB stock that was available in the fab inventory, so I decided that I will make a double sided board for this week. The idea is to have all the logic and connectors on one side of the board and the input/output (in my case a simple push button and a LED).
I decided to use kicad over Eagle because of the ability to export STEP files for integration in SoldWorks (which I'm more used to). So here is the clean slate I started with:
Once I had the kicad library set up using the class files, I additinally had to manually link the footprints and the schematics of the components before I could proceed. Once I had all that ready, I started with the schematic of the board. Soon I had this:
Now for the fun part, routing all the components on both sides of the board. I personally thought it was quite fun (like solving a puzzle) to try route all the connections mannualy, so I did. Being able to use vias and both sides of the board made it so much more interesting!
Here is an image of the top of the board. I decided to have all the connectors, microcontroller and required electronics i.e. the filtering capacitor, the pull-up resistor, the current limiting resistor (for the LED) and the ceramic resonator etc on the top of the board.
The circular dots in the adjacent figure are where the vias would go to connect to the other side of the board.
On the other side of the board I decided to place my push button and an LED.
With all that set, it was time to mill the board. Here is the tricky bit, since I'm milling both sides of the board, the alignment of the board is extremely important
to ensure that when the holes for the vias are drilled, they indeed connect both sides of the board.
