This week started off strong with starting the PCB of my zoetrope project. Last week I completed the staining and full assembly of the zoetrope and even got it up and running able to spin and fully view the animation without the need for an external power supply. It was really cool to finally see the project finally running but on the wooden zoetrope with everything packed inside.
However it was a jungle of wires inside there so I needed to finally begin the PCB. I ran into a couple hiccups along the way such as getting all the correct components for my PCB. The metro mini component I knew existed somewhere because me and Aaron had used it on a past project so I asked him where it was and I found it was in a shared library we had on our fusion team. I had to transfer the library to my own file which I did by exporting and I was finally able to use the metro mini in the design but the next problem was with the motor driver because there wasn't a component for it. So with the help of Mr. L I was able to create a component for the motor driver after a several step process.
I had to first create a new component obviously in the library I had for the zoetrope and then following the creation of the component I had to add on some additional parts. I had to create a drawing for it so that in the schematic it could actually be represented by a symbol which wasn't difficult the most interesting part comes from the footprint when I had to actually space out the holes properly. I used a really helpful strategy from Mr. L to speed up the process significantly where to measure out the distance between the holes I counted the spaces on the bread board. Each gap between holes was roughly 100 mils with 5 gaps between the pins, and the grid on the foot print was 50 mils between each space that meant all I had to do was make the pins 10 spaces apart on the foot print. This was way easier than getting a pair of calipers and having to measure and convert to mils.
After creating the component I added it to the schematic along with the metro mini and I just used some headers for the mosfet and the various voltage converters because they aren't complicated components and can be represented with just a 3 pin and 2 pin headers.
So after creating the schematic I realized I did not know how to connect the LED Drivers power and ground to the PCBs. There was multiple wires that were connected to each lead with 3 being connected to power one for the 12 volt converter, one for the 5 volt converter, and one for the LEDs. And then there was 4 connected to ground one for the 12 volt converter ground, one for the 5 volt converter ground, one for the mosfet ground, and one for the Metro mini ground. So the solution I came up with was to use some terminal blocks to attach all the wires.
After getting all the wires screwed in I went ahead and crimped the wires for the converters and other wires to get them prepped for soldering and connecting to the PCB. I used polarized crimp connectors which would allow my connections to be much more secure and not let me make any mistakes plugging them in the wrong way.
My schematic was finalized and I converted it into a PCB document as well allowing me to finally get ready to mill my PCB.
The milling process didn't go exactly as smoothly as I'd hoped however. When I went to mill it for the first time there was a lot of red on the traces showing where it would not cut so I went back and changed the schematic by shifting things around, and it still didn't work. So I went back and changed it again for the second time and it still was showing red so I manually routed my whole PCB. But then it continued to show red but it showed red on the pads for the headers so I had to go back again and keep changing the diameter of each of the headers until it worked. I ended up with 5 different file saves of my PCB.
Finally once it was ready to mill I got it on the machine and then I noticed the traces were very very small and I got concerned about it because it looked like some of the traces were so small they were even ripped up. So I waited another day to mill a whole other PCB which I did. My plan is to completely solder the PCB and then hopefully by next week I can have the full Zoetrope assembled and completed.
Comentarios