Arkadian.eu

I have been toying with the idea of designing my own circuit boards and this post is about my very first board.

Back in December,  I decided to give it a go and design something very simple. It was meant to be more like a training exercise, rather than a board I desperately needed.  The board was going to have 3 small potentiometers; by attaching it on an arduino I should be able to get the readings on the serial port.

After looking at all the different software packages, I ended up using FreePCB to design a very simple circuit board.  I found that FreePCB was very easy to learn and use.  I used BatchPCB (a SparkFun service) to get the card printed:

http://www.batchpcb.com/index.php/Products/26633

The guys at BatchPCB were kind enough to send me two boards (I only ordered one). The order took approx 4 weeks, which is not bad, if you are after the cheapest possible way of getting a board printed. I paid $14, including delivery to London.

Front side, with the potentiometers. By the way, when I got the board back, I realised that I got the numbering wrong: instead of A5, A4, A3, it should read A0, A1, A2…

Back

pins and pots soldered in position (I know, I need to work on my soldering skills…)

The mini board on a freeduino board

The following Arduino code works nicely for this example:

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int sensorPin1 = 1;
int sensorValue1 = 1;
 
int sensorPin2 = 2;
int sensorValue2 = 2;
 
int sensorPin0 = 0;
int sensorValue0 = 0;
 
void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
}
 
void loop() {
 // read the value from the sensor:
 sensorValue0 = analogRead(sensorPin0);
 sensorValue1 = analogRead(sensorPin1);
 sensorValue2 = analogRead(sensorPin2);    
 
 //print the value on the terminal
 Serial.print(sensorValue0);
 Serial.print(" \t ");
 Serial.print(sensorValue1);
 Serial.print(" \t ");
 Serial.print(sensorValue2);
 Serial.println("");
 
 delay(100);
}

As I said before, this was just a test. Hopefully my next board will be part of a more exciting project!