Washtenaw Community College ENGR Seminar

I am a PCB Design Engineer and Researcher for the University of Michigan, and Kettering University. I am teaching a seminar at Washtenaw Community College where I will be teaching ~40 students how to design their very first PCB. I have designed an ATtiny85 Development Board for the students to create, and I will be leading them through the recreation of it, along with the process of skimming datasheets, creating symbols and footprints, 3D modeling STEP files for rendering, and exporting P&P, BOM, and Gerber files.

The goal of this seminar is to make PCB Designing and Engineering as accessible to new students as possible, and to design a board that they can walk away with at the end of the semester and feel accomplished.

An up-close render of the 50x20mm devkit shows exposed traces, and silkscreen tracing for buried power lines. This allows newer students to easily follow the traces and compare it to their schematic. A shunt on the top of the board is provided for students to enable or disable the status LEDs for personal needs in their projects (power saving, signal integrity, etc).

On the back, the Data traces for the Status LEDs for each I/O pin on the ATtiny are made visible.

Students will lean the importance of excellent organization of a project, and how it impacts the debugging process. Students will recreate a cover page, block diagram, main schematic, and include hyperlinks on the front page for ease of navigation.

Words to PCBWay

We are currently still searching for sponsorships to help cover the cost. We would love to work with you for production and assembly if we would be able to be given a discount of sorts.