VikeDuino Uno - Through-Hole Arduino Uno for CSU

This Arduino Uno is the same form factor as the original Arduino Uno, but is made to be solderable and cost-effective for education. The design costs less than $15 per board. All of the parts are either through-hole or large package surface mount, with the exception of the Atmel ATMEGA16u2, which is a VQFN. The ATMEGA16u2 will be pre-soldered before the seminar.

I designed this board to teach soldering to Freshman and Sophomore engineering students at Cleveland State University about soldering and PCB design. I will be teaching 100 students over two weekends how to solder a PCB in hopes to inspire students to work on projects outside of class.

The course will begin by going over the basics of what a PCB is and how they are made. We will then briefly discuss how this board was designed in Eagle and how to design and order a PCB for your own projects. My hope is that in the future, I will be able to start an elective course completely dedicated to teaching students how to design their own PCBs and then order them from places like PCBWay. We will then move to a brief discussion of soldering and how it works. Each of the 20 students will receive a soldering iron, a VikeDuino PCB, a USB-B Cable, and all of the components necessary to build the board. Using a microscope attached to a projector, I will demonstrate part by part how to assemble the board and how to solder. Once soldering is complete, we will load the bootloader to their board and upload a sample program. We will then program the boards with a test script___ and hook up a test circuit to the Arduino to verify that each pin works.

After the class is complete, each student will have soldered his or her very own Arduino Uno and will get to keep the board for no cost. This will give every student the opportunity to work on Arduino projects outside of class, without having to purchase an Arduino for themselves.

The Gerber Files for the PCB can be found on my Github: https://github.com/RowdyRutabaga/VikeDuino_Uno