As part of my project; a small monitoring tool to monitor beehives dubbed ‘BeeSafe’ I have been designing and assembling a small printed circuit board – PCB, to collect all the sensors together.
Previous parts of this build can be found at:
http://www.mathewjenkinson.co.uk/beesafe-concept-development/
With the board printed and etched it was now time to solder on all the components and begin testing.
As you can see from the picture below; soldering is a skill I’m still to master!
Version 1 of BeeSafe PCB
Following what I thought to be a simple design I quickly found out that I had errors both in the pin layout and the physical spacing of the components used on the board.
The placement of the GPIO connector (13 x 2 lines of pins) meant that the board was in an awkward position and the cable pushed up against the accelerator / motion detector.
Physical component wise, the LED’s were situated too close to each other, meaning that when it came to solder them, they were all on-top of one another.
Its important to stress that while this PCB hasn’t been a success, it hasn’t been a failure either. This PCB came from a new manufacturing process where I used a laminator and gloss paper as the toner transfer method. As you can see from the image above the process itself was a success!
From here, the PCB design will go back to square one. I want to switch from using Adobe Illustrator to a proper PCB design software such as Eagle PCB which will allow me to design better more complex boards that can include things like silk screen’s and will be easier to scale up production should this be required.