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MARCH 2019 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 21 fall at GFU, you take microprocessors. You're given a PCB that is already laid out, and then you have to code it and make programs for it. George Fox made this board, and it's ready for all the programs that you do here; you just have to code it. The spring semester of your junior year is embedded systems. Now, you take your knowledge of coding and get to design the board. You use Altium Designer to lay out everything and learn how that process goes. You put all the vias down and traces and do that entire process, buy the parts that you need, and write the code for the project. What I loved about it was it was full circle. In the industry, you might only touch one of those things, but at school, we got to see how cool the whole process was when it came to frui- tion. We also got to tour Sunstone and see how that process looked, which was interesting. Johnson: That changes your perspective. Just because the CAD tool can do it or represent it doesn't mean the fabricator can make it. Whipple: That was something I learned just recently. We have a PCB machine that can drill holes. I thought, "I'll make this via this many millimeters, but then I go up in the machine, and I only have a drill bit that's this many mil - limeters. That's not going to work." I kind of take it for granted because when we were at Sunstone, they had a bunch of tools, so you can probably get by without looking at the specifications, but not here. We only have eight drill bits. You have to make sure that your via falls in that range. It was really interesting learning about that process in the tour and see what manufacturing looked like. As we walked through, I wondered, "Where are we in the stage here?" There was a lot going on at the plant, and it was kind of over- whelming walking through. I felt like I didn't get to see a lot, and even though I didn't follow it quite correctly, you can design your board at GFU, pick the parts, code it, and ship it off. When it comes back to you, you get to see that whole process. Johnson: That's a valuable part of understand- ing how PCB fabrication works. It helps to go there and see that the boards swish and agitate in tanks of chemicals. That's a part of the pro- cess. It isn't all digital, and it's not clean like 3D printing (laughs). From there you've moved into putting together your boards and then designing your own boards, how did that work? Whipple: In that class, you have to choose a project that kind of needs to be run by Dr. Spivey, our instructor, because he doesn't want it to be super easy like just turning an LED on. He wants you to have some sort of goal with good functionality and multiple things that we've learned in the past implemented on it. I decided to go with embedded system design. It was a circuit board, and it's called a Bible quiz hub—a game show system with six buttons that represented the players. When you pressed it, the order that those six players responded to the question would light up in an LED matrix showing the order. I went through the design process and sent my board off to Sunstone. I thought, "I hope I bought all my components correctly and I hope my schematic was right." I had a seven- segment digital display on there, and I com- pletely wired it wrong. I don't know what I was doing that day, but the schematic was just completely wrong. I couldn't even get power The engineering lab at George Fox University has the latest tools and equipment.