Sunday, August 22, 2004

 

Printing and etching

Played a few more hours with wire widths and finally printed the thing on Press'n'Peel. Every site and reference said that Press'n'Peel is easy to use and most people succeed at first. Well MOST maybe but not ALL I can assure you.
I corrected the PCB before etching with Patex glue. Not a very main-stream method (to say the least) but I was too impatient to wait till Monday to buy some correcting pen or something. This glue (Patex Repair Extreme to be precise) forms a somewhat flexible greyish substance after drying - but more importantly it is not etched away (trivial) and it's easy to remove.
Etching went like a breeze, no problems there. I used Fe(3)Cl. Cannot comment on ratio of water to FeCl and such; I simply dropped FeCl into water until it seemed OK.

Thursday, August 19, 2004

 

Less stitching

I just HAD to create a layout at least one stitch (jumper-wire) less than the commonly available (and excellent) design by Bojan Dobaj (his original includes 6 jumper wires, mine uses 5). Reducing the number of stitches doesn't really make sense in itself; I think what I created is not better, but it was a challenge and I really enjoyed it. Also learnt some tactics in PCB routing.

Sunday, August 08, 2004

 

Routing

First I tried different component placements and just hopelessly kept pressing the autoroute button. After seeing it led nowhere started to use some more brain-power. In the end (for a one-sided board at least) my opinion is: do not use the autorouter at all!

Sunday, August 01, 2004

 

Design the programmer

I know enough about EAGLE to start designing the programmer (actually it will be a P16PRO40 so "design" here is more about learning the software rather then real mental effort).

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