Our Fab students have been introduced to the Roland Modela MDX20 milling machine and to the supreme crafting art of soldering. With great powers come great responsibility… So this week we have been busy troubleshooting, troubleshooting, troubleshoooting!
For the ones that are new to PCB boards productions, there are different techniques of getting a board done. One of these is by milling the fine copper layer on plastic pcb boards with a super fine drill bit, using Fabmodules software to create the milling path (.rml file). Other techniques include etching (with nasty chemicals), using vynil stencils and solder paste, and many other techniques that our Fab students will definitely come up with in the next weeks!
The board we produced is the FabISP, an in-system programmer for AVR microcontrollers. We had a record of 20 FabISP boards produced this week, and all working fine thanks to Local Guru Ferdi superpowers! Although to get to this result it took the whole group a lot of troubleshooting and collaboration. We had lots of different problems to solve: finding the errors in the soldering, detecting misplaced electronic components and flipped diodes, programmer errors, broken copper traces, Windows programmer incompatibility…
If you are interested in learning more about our efforts visit the individual student pages. They all produced a great deal of documentation.
Yani Ylioja has redesigned the board with an additional led to show when the board is receiving power and being programmed!
Stay tuned for updates of future weeks!
