Reflective Journal 3

A new week has arrive and with it comes new challenges as well as new experiences. So what have I experience this week you may ask? Well its something I have not touch in a while and it was a good exercise to recall back what I've learned. This week's class was about importing circuits from Multisim to Ultiboard. First off, we had to 'design' or more or less assemble the circuit from the schematic which was given by En. Redzuan in Multisim.

The above diagram is the circuit which has been assembled in Multisim. As we can see here, some of the components are blue in colour and some are in black. Why the difference in colours? This is to show whether the components we are using are virtual components (non-existing components) or whether we are using real components (components existing in the market). What we want is so that all the components we are using are real components and this is done by choosing a footprint for each of the components that we are using. After doing that the circuit should look like below.

Now all the components are blue in colour which indicates that they are real components and if you look closely, the 12V DC input has been replace with another component. That is an input for the source. This is because a 12V DC source is not a real existing component and has to be replace with something that is real. Only after this done, and all the components that are in our circuit are real components can we then export our design to Ultiboard.

The above is how it will look like after we transfer the circuit over to Ultiboard. As we can see, the components are all situated on the top left hand corner and the rectangular space is our board that we are going to mount our components on. We can also crop the board into what ever shape we like.

After cropping my board is now in the shape of an oval. After that we drag and place the components where we want it to be on the board.

The above is the result after placing the components on the board. When we are doing this, we have to consider where the connectors go so that they do not overlap. At this stage, we also edit the size of the connectors to make sure it is not too thin. This is a very crucial stage as an overlapping connector or a connector which is too thin can cause the program to produce an error message when we finalize the design later on.

The above is the finalize design with no errors and viewed in 3D form.

And this is the view from below. We can clearly see the connectors which will be on the printed circuit board that we want to create here. So basically that was what we learned in En.Redzuan's class this week. Awaiting what is in store for us next week. Till then, sayonara.