Week 4 : Electronics Production

Global Lecture held 15 February, 2017.

Electronics are everywhere. Because of their increasing reliability and cheapness they are replacing many mechanical systems as well as enabling complex actions from even the simplest of things. While a laptop or phone may come to our mind when we think "electronics," most of these bit-pushers are far from the glamorous iPhone -- most are small, simple pieces of silicone and other materials that only do a handful (if more than just one) things.

Over the course of the next few months we will be using our fancy laptops to interface with these much simpler boards -- many of which we will design and make ourselves. These boards will collect data, light up LEDs, and even talk to each other. For this to happen though, we need a tool which will allow for the computer to talk to these boards.

Some electronics incorporate special components called ICs. Essentially, they are little bundles of many components, and some can be programmed (or locked) to act in certain ways. The nice thing about ICs is that they tend to be standard bundles of components which means that through programming them, one IC design/SKU can do many different things. For this to happen we need a way to communicate with this IC and convince it to reconfigure itself.

This week, we are going to make an ISP which is a device which enables a computer to program certain types of ICs. There is a little "meta-ness" to all of this since we will be using an ISP (off the shelf) to program a board with an IC on it which will then become an ISP of its own. We could then use this board that we made to program other boards to become ISPs!

~ Vipul & Henry

Evaluation

Global Criteria

Local Requirements

1. Find a cool [new] material or process. Bring in a tagged sample.

The Plan

1. Mill out an electronics board to learn how to use the Roland Milling Machine
2. Stuff the board by soldering on the components.
3. Program the board -- load a program to program

Labs This Week

Lab on PCB Milling & Stuffing

TBD

Topics to cover / rough agenda

1. TBD

Lab on PCB Programming

TBD

Topics to cover / rough agenda

1. TBD