← Archive

Thor's Hammer PCB

complete

My first PCB, and the enclosure I built to give it somewhere to live: Mjolnir.

The circuit is a timer. Press the button and the lights blink asynchronously between 500 and 1000 milliseconds, depending on where the potentiometer is set.

The layout in KiCad — pads, traces and mounting holes, before any copper existed.
The layout in KiCad — pads, traces and mounting holes, before any copper existed.

I designed the circuit and then built the entire board file in KiCad. I went one-sided (since my professor said that it would be more of a challenge), which makes routing harder and the result cheaper, and the layout turned out to be the part I enjoyed most. I like Tetris, and PCB design felt like a huge game of Tetris.

The populated board. Three DIPs, electrolytics, film caps — and drm66 in the silkscreen.
The populated board.
The solder side: the routing as it actually came out, joint by joint.
The solder side: the routing as it actually came out, joint by joint.
The one-shot firing on the scope. This is the circuit doing exactly what it was drawn to do.
The one-shot firing on the scope. This is the circuit doing exactly what it was drawn to do.

The design for the enclosure was anything we imagined, so I wanted to test my Onshape skills by creating something that would leverage all of the things we learned in the class.

The assembly, exploded: board inside the head, engraved side plates, wrapped handle.
The assembly, exploded: board inside the head, engraved side plates, wrapped handle.
658.0 g of Mjolnir.
658.0 g of Mjolnir.
Holding it up, lights running. Watch on YouTube

Onshape CAD: The CAD is on Onshape if you want to pull the assembly apart yourself, and the gerbers, BOM and DRC report are all in the repo.