Intro:
The process for electronic production.
The process for electronic production.
A little explanation about how to set the Mods platform.
We use this board as an initial soldering practice, before switching to the USB to FTDI, which has more complicated components such as the microcontroller.
For this we had to use 10 LEDS, and we decided to use 5 red and 5 green to have variety. We also decided to use different types of resistors such as 200 OHMs, 100 OHMs, 49.9 OHMs, 10 OHMs and 1 OHMs, to see the difference generated by them.
SOURCE: Learn Adafruit
There are two ways to program an AVR microcontroller. One is to reprogram the entire chip using an AVR programmer. The other is to use a bootloader that is pre-programmed onto the chip that allows the chip to re-program itself. An AVR programmer is more powerful: you can really mess with anything on the chip and the entire 32K of memory is available. Using the bootloader is safer: there's no way to mess with the fuse settings (which could brick the chip) but you only get 30K of memory since 2K is used by the bootloader. Not a big deal, but if you are working on a big project which requires tons of flash space, you may need it.
AVR programmers are more powerful in that you can program any AVR, even blank ones from the factory. But that also means you have a pretty good chance of 'bricking' the chip!
FTDI adapters can send any serial data back and forth including updating AVRs with a bootloader on them. But you need to get that bootloader on there first, which basically requires an AVR programmer.
Another good tip, as long as you can choose, is to use trougholes instead of SMD pins (my preference), because they will grab harder from the PCB and last longer. But a better tip than that, is to solder your pins backwards whenever you can. For that sometimes you might even need to design it all backwards, but it worths it a lot, since that is going to help you a lot to solder your pins properly to the copper part, because if not, you will have to manage to get the soldering tip under the plastic female pinholes and you will probably burn them and also because they hold much harder.
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