Red Hot PCB of the Week: Bucknell University

This week’s featured PCB comes from Bucknell University. Matthew Lamparter, Laboratory Director for the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, designed these beautiful boards, which will provide power to microwaves the students create.

The boards were created for the Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems course, taught by Dr. Philip Asare, and they are part of a prototype for a microwave user interface (it looks like a microwave, and does everything except actually heating your food). The board provides power to the different parts of the system (6V for the motor and 5V (USB) for the logic and other peripherals).

The objective of this course is to help students understand that seemingly simple systems on the outside can be quite complex on the inside, and that working with Embedded and Cyber-Physical Systems requires attention to many different details. The students are using skills from across the Electrical and Computer Engineering spectrum to build a real system that they can plug into the wall using many different power domains to ensure correct operation of the various pieces these boards.

The Bucknell board in action.

Shout out to Matt and Philip from Bucknell University for their contributions to this Red Hot PCB post.

Follow their progress on Twitter and Facebook! Let us know what you think of this PCB or the Bucknell project by commenting below!