Saturday, June 23
Well, this special semester wasn't actually that bad aside from the daily tests and the tideous long hours of class from morning till evening. I got to learn how to produce and design my own printed circuit board (PCB). I snapped a few shots to mark my first ever attempt on circuit board fabrication.. hehe
.jpg)
me developing the board before etching and stripping
.jpg)
Uh.. I'll give a brief explanation on the process, and I'm trying hard to make it as interesting as possible. Well, before the whole fabrication process begins, we used a software called Protel 99 SE to design a schematic diagram on how the circuit and components should be placed and the copper connections were routed accordingly on a computer, and then printed out on a transparency. The transparency was then mirrored and taped on the raw board before being developed. We had to handle the raw board under dark lighting, something like what you'd do when developing photos the old fashioned way.
The taped board was then exposed to UV light for around 90 seconds as shown below.
The taped board was then exposed to UV light for around 90 seconds as shown below.
.jpg)
ultra violet rays babeh!
Then an imprint on the raw will be immersed into some chemical substance to be developed, etched and then stripped as shown below.
.jpg)
dip dipeedy dum dum..
Then an imprint on the raw will be immersed into some chemical substance to be developed, etched and then stripped as shown below.
.jpg)
dip dipeedy dum dum..
After the fabrication process was done, this was the finished product with nothing but copper connections.
.jpg)
the final product.
I've gotta say, it was really a feeling of achievement when u successfully turned a digitally imprinted transparency into something real and solid that you could feel with your own hands.
.jpg)
from virtual to reality
The next step was drilling the holes on each padding to assemble the components.
.jpg)
Voila! The finished product!
However, the circuit didn't work on how it was supposed to. After the IC was mounted and switched on, the single LED will be lit and the 8 LEDs were supposed to blink with a repeated wave from left to right, and when the triggering switched was turned, it'll switch direction from right to left. In my case, the single LED was lit but when the triggering switch was switched, the circuit completely turned off. In the end the mistake was in the footprint when we were routing the switch, turns out that the switch pins were mistakenly routed, so I wasn't the only one at fault.
Turns out being an electronic engineering student isn't really that bad after all.. who knows?
More posts soon.. ;)
Turns out being an electronic engineering student isn't really that bad after all.. who knows?
More posts soon.. ;)
___________________________________________________________________________________
