In this lab you will create a PCB pendant from scratch
The goal is to gain familiarity with PCB fabrication and hands on hardware experience. We will use a 555 timer chip to make a flashing LED pendant. We will use a TL555, which can be run off 3.7V, allowing us to power the device with a coin cell battery.
(10 pts)
PCB Layout Design
Start by designing your PCB, then milling on the CNC in the lab. After this you will solder the components onto the board.
Deadline listed on courseworks.
This is an open-ended, creatively driven project. There are two main goals. The first goal is to introduce you to the challenge of working with an underspecified problem and writing code that is creatively driven rather than driven by specifications. The second goal is to get you comfortable with showing you art to the world in a low stakes way.
Submit a link to your blog post on the course blog. That post should contain:
(10 pts total - see below for breakdown)
In addition to the project specific deliverables lists above, you must also meet the following “standard documentation deliverables”. Throughout this course, we will ask you to document your work in order to slowly build a portfolio of your projects. Going forward, these types of standard documentation deliverables can be assumed to be required for all assignments unless specified otherwise.
(5 pts) A blog post
Using a blog site of your choice (github pages, hackaday, medium, notion, etc) make a blog post describing your art. The post should give an overview of your artistic vision. What creative decisions did you work lead you to, and which decisions did you take? How were your decisions motivated by your larger creative vision for this project.
(3 pts) A github repo
Create a github repo wtih a readme that contains a short description and key information on reproducibility/installation/usage. For this assignment, you will ikely have design files and a README only. This key information should be sufficient for a knowledge third party, outside the class, to replicate your design (moduluo having access to hardware). This readme should be a more techincal documentation as opposed to your blog post.
(2 pts) Visual documentation of your art
Both your blog post and the README should have some amount of visual documentation. Typically the blog post will have a video. The README can have some lighter weight visuals (e.g. a still image). The video can be a simple video shot on your phone - assuming you use basic best practices as discussed in class. You can host the video wherever you like as long as the hosting platform supports in-browser playback (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo). You may also choose to embed a gif in your README in place of a video link.