This week was short but I still was able to make some progress on my PCB. The first step was importing all the different components into Fusion, which was simple. Cormac shared his custom library with me to save me the time of making my own. I added a metro mini and two three headed pin headers, one for the IR receiver and one for LED strip. I connected ground to ground, power to power, and all the appropriate pins to each other before I started routing. I was having some trouble making the wires from routing the correct 18 millimeters and I kept getting error messages telling me it wasn't possible to make them that big (they are 6 millimeters on default). Eventually I was able to get all the wired the right size after doing some auto routing and routing half of the PCB manually. Before I went to go mill, Cormac noticed that the pin headers in my design looked bigger than his. We didn't think much of it, so we went to go mill.
Cormac taught me how to jog and step the PCB mill, as well as how to change the drill size. I got a piece of PCB copper from the supply closest and taped it down the mill. I then imported my file into the Bantam application, however we noticed that pins were circular, not ovals like they should be. We went ahead with the print anyways to see what would happen, and it did in fact print like how it looked. Mr. L noticed that I didn't have the Bantam library installed in Fusion, which may have been the root of the problem. We found what we assumed to be the library on the Bantam website, so Installed it and re routed the whole PCB. I had to half auto route and half manually route it myself, but I was able to get it done quickly. We then went to go mill again, however it gave us the same result. We didn't even bother cutting it because the pins still looked circular in the Bantam application, and there was no point in wasting material. With whatever time I have left this week I want to try to figure out why it's doing that so I can mill the PCB and start to solder it.
Comments