first i made a design, i had paper with squares, 26 horizontal and 37 vertical, so that would be the maximum size of the board. i did many revisions of the design, just to make sure i had accounted for everything...
i would place components on the vero board to check there was enough space between components and so that if i needed to drill a hole to separate the track, i would be able to. i found from previous experiments that i needed 1 "hole" as a gap between components that needed the track drilled.
i soldered the socket for the chip, the switch and the crystal in place. the chip socket's first pin is soldered to pin 12x,13y. the swich is soldered onto pin 1. the crystal is soldered between pin 9&10.
here you can see my soldering and drilling... its not that good... (gets worse!)
then its c1, c2, c3, c8, L1... c1 is soldered on 22x in line with pin 10, c2 on 21x in line with pin 9 , with with one hole between their legs, drilled. c3 between 7 & 8, L1 on 19x with a drilled hold between its legs. same with c8.
my solder work for these components. knowtice how shocking c1 and c2 are joined... i think this may cause me some serious problems. the soldering iron was too hot... i have a magnum 2002 soldering station, with very little experience. if anyone is reading this and can tell me what the right temperature to solder is... then that would be great and much appreciated!
in the top left corner, is a 5 pin header, in place of the serial DB9 sub connector... looking back i should have just soldered the serial connector on, breaking off the 4 unused pins... however, my top line of my board is the ground (bottom is +5V) so i know in my mind that pin 5 of the serial port is connected to the ground. this saves me some space in case i need the pin holes. so my serial connector goes like this from top to bottom, {5,1,2,3,4}port c is from pin 23 to 28, nothing special there... the pin 1 is connected to the ICSP pin 5... & yes, my ICSP ordering is different as well...
c6 and c2 are joined by a wire bridge.
c1/2 is connected to pin 6 of my ICSP via a wire bridge...
ok so i lost connection with my camera... my parents wanted to borrow it, so i went ahead and did the rest of the board with out taking photos. :( i will try redo the design as i have the board here, labling everything, giving step by step instruction, at work tomorrow, then make another post for that... im really not even sure the board will actually work... take a look below!
i soldered c5 and c8's negative to positive over the voltage regulator, when i connected it to the power source (without the ATmege8) the power LED light up for a while... the c8 blew up, scaring the cr@p out of me...! you can see the insides of c8 all over my pcb! lovely!
so this is what not to do! the shield part of the cap shot up like a bullet! i replaced c8 the right way this time... and...
we see the power LED light up. i left it like this for 5 minutes, just to be sure that nothing else would blow up... i really hope i have built everything properly...now i need to get a boot loader onto the ATmega8!
