EE 156 - Board Level Design

After five years of using Arduinos, Raspberry Pi’s, and other pre-fabricated PCB’s to run my projects, I finally decided to take a PCB design course at Stanford, EE 156. This class was…HARD! But I learned so much, and am eternally grateful for the skills I took away from this class. I learned how to do rapid circuit prototyping using copper plates, make successful a successful PCB that served as a interfacing module for the BME680 temperature and humidity sensor chip, and made simple PCB’s for other small chips. I also learned how to use KiCad, and how to export a PCB to a manufacturer. For the final project, we had to design a four-layer board with two different communication modalities, two sensors, one microcontroller, a power management system, data storage, all for under $100 and on a maximum 99x99 mm board. I decided to design a bass guitar tuner that displayed the note and pitch on two different LED bar graphs. The board had an SD card for logging the player’s note history, could be used with a USB-C or li-po battery, and used SPI communication to the SD card and the bar graph controller. It used a samd51J19A chip, and had an electret microphone and a plug in contact microphone so the user could play out loud or muted.

Below are some design documents and the KiCad files for the board, along with the photos of other boards I worked on in this class. I actually made a good amount of mistakes on this board, leading me to spend longer than the quarter on it, and I was not able to finish the project completely before the grade deadline, so beware - this PCB is not fully functional and has some bugs that I hope to troubleshoot if I return to this project. I was able to verify the power worked on the board, along with the individual sensors, and I made some edits before I had to call it quits.

Here’s a link to a google folder with some of my design documents. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pORTwGu_Suc3tiLd-RAWml4Dy0cAIGlE?usp=drive_link