With this project I worked with four other students to build separate wireless communication boards. The end goal was a device based off of an ATMEGA256FR2 Xplained Pro that would communicate between the different boards using ZigBee.
The part of the schematic I was fully responsible for.
My responsibility in the project was to the design the circuitry to connect the board to a PC's serial port and to take everyone's schematics for their sections and combine them into one project. We however did our layouts and assembly separately. This layout ended up being a little more trickier than that of my OBD-II Scanner. However I think this layout ended up better. I did notice after that I put some decoupling capacitors unnecessarily far away but I had the shortest distance to the antenna from the transceiver and the least number of vias.
My layout with the copper fill hidden.
For the assembly of the device I had the PCB tracing done externally but did everything else myself including soldering of parts in a reflow oven. During assembly it became apparent to me that one of the team members had made a mistake with the footprint for the debugger chip. Without that chip it became impossible to program the device trough USB. The device however could still be programmed through the serial port and powered by the USB. I didn't get around to programming however as a I ran out of time. The device should function as intended though once the short is found as the device is based on closely on the Xplained Pro.
Assembled communication board.
This project allowed me to learn more about wireless communication, specifically ZigBee and the QPSK modulation scheme it uses. It especially opened my eyes even more to how important what I learned in linear systems analysis was to communication theory. Also since the continuity and coordination of the team I was working with wasn't as great as other teams I had been in. It gave me a great opportunity to learn about team coordination and management.