This is an exercise in soldering surface mount components onto a PCB. The goal is to develop skill in assembling surface-mount boards. The circuit itself has a couple of interesting features, but the operation of the circuit is of secondary importance in terms of this lab exercise. If we manage to solder all of the components onto the board without destroying the circuit or sneezing away all of the components, we will consider this a successful endeavor.

The board has a variety of parts — resistors, ceramic capacitors, electrolytic capacitors, an op amp, an ATtiny microcontroller, various connectors, and a momentary switch. The parts are 0805 size or bigger, so we should be able to solder them by hand. The circuit is a simple photodetector amp along with a microcontroller. In principle, the circuit could be used to measure and log light levels in some photonic application. However, as stated above, our emphasis is this exercise is the "building" rather than the "using". The circuit and PCB were designed by the Francisco Alegria and Thomas Kimler during the Fall 2019 semester.

All of the parts and the PCBs will be available from the TAs in the lab, and they will give you all the help you need to learn how to solder a (relatively) tiny circuit. In addition, Francisco created a youTube as he built one of the circuits — you can use that as guide if you are working on the circuit outside of a normal lab time.

Below are the circuit schematic and the pcb image taken from the KiCad project. You can download a zip file that has all of the KiCad files and an Excel spreadsheet with the parts listed.

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