Students Tackle PCB Design Challenge: From Schematic to Robot
University of Minnesota students Ethan Chung, Kevin Vo, and Alexander Wan discuss their line-following robot project for the Bright Manufacturing Challenge, detailing their transition from schematics to manufacturing custom PCBs. They explain their use of Altium Designer to create a main chassis board and a specialized flex-rigid PCB for encoder positioning, highlighting the technical decision to use a secondary microcontroller to comply with competition rules. The team shares lessons learned from their first manufacturing attempt, specifically regarding microcontroller documentation errors and the unexpected high cost of 4-layer flex-rigid boards, while outlining their path toward the final assembly and testing rounds in Chicago.