Overview

Happy Tuesday everyone! I hope that you are starting to make your way back to work and are enjoying the course. I know we've had some struggles along the way, and I appreciate the fact that you are hanging in there. This week we have webinars and layout. Woohoo!

Webinars

Mike Konrad of Aqueostech is going to move his June 18th webinar on PCB Cleaning to May 28th.

Register here

Mike is a fantastic guest who has his own podcast Reliability Matters that you might enjoy. I was a guest for episode 39: Producing Reliable Assemblies, and I found episode 16: Lessons Learned from a Contract Manufacturer & The Customer That Sued Them particularly interesting.

Week 8 Readme

Now the real excitement begins! This week you will begin creating your board in your EDA software. Soon you'll have a badge in hand! And within the next several days, I expect to be able to share videos of a sample layout from Autodesk's Jorge Garcia

Prerequisites:

At this point you should have:

Read and completed everything in the Week 6 Readme
Read Schematic Creation
Submitted your design in the Schematic Peer Review activity and reviewed two projects from fellow participants.

This Week

You will design a board outline and place some of the more critical parts. You need to decide a few things -- such as board outline and battery options (we are not providing batteries for you due to shipping restraints) -- There are several options including rechargeable LiPo batteries, alkaline, and NiMH, but you need to decide how to make it happen.

Activities

Roadmap

This week is the most exciting week of the course! We will attempt to place critical part groups this week run traces and copper pours next week. Then we'll talk about design rules and DFM/DFA checks! We're close :)