During the summer of 2022 I worked at an engineering summer camp teaching Arduino to Middle and High Schoolers. The camp needed an additional soldering lab, so I took on the task of designing a PCB on which students could solder on components. My goal was to make the final product a fun visual experience with LEDs and games to spark the interest our campers.

The first iteration had a major flaw in that the complete ring of LEDs blocked the micro usb port on the Pico. There were also additional components on this board that I decided were unnecessary, such as a temperature sensor and buzzer. Otherwise, this first iteration proved successful, and after changing a few details version 2 was created. All of the PCBs were ordered through JLC PCB, which proved to yield good results.

On the final board, I removed a row of LEDs and shifted the layout. This board proved to be successful. Over the course of the summer camp over 360 boards were soldered and went home with campers. The students would solder all of the components to their board, and then a Lab Tech would flash their board with code using Rshell, a command prompt for communication with microcontrollers.

We did face some issues with the board over the course of the camp, mostly due to the fact that many campers were new to soldering. The biggest issue that happened repeatedly was campers frying the Pico by accidently short circuiting it or overheating it during soldering. Luckily by the end of the camp the Lab Techs had gotten extremely good at troubleshooting boards (and speed soldering replacements).

The largest problem with the lab was that most campers finished early, and wanted more to do. I did have an additional 10k resistor and photoresistor footprints on the PCBs, but the photoresistors were not consistent enough to be useful.

I wanted something special for my own personal PCB, so I 3D printed a case for it, which features flexible button covers and diffuses the LEDs.