Hardware Podcasts

Students Tackle PCB Design Challenge: From Schematic to Robot

OnTrack · 16 Sept 2025 · 30m · Episode 311

What this episode covers

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.

Most relevant to

founders before launch

Topics

Mentioned

Companies
Altium, SMTA
Tools
Altium Designer, Onshape, ChatGPT, Perplexity
Also
Bright Manufacturing Challenge, University of Minnesota

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