PCB Design

The first part of PCB design is drawing a schematic. There were no slides for this presentation; instead, we did a live demo of the software in class. If you missed it, please check out the class recording below!

Resource links:

• KiCAD download page

  • KiCAD is totally free (and very popular)!

  • Select your OS, then download from whichever region you prefer (they're all the same installer, just distributed to different servers for better download speeds)

• Saturn PCB Toolkit 

  • Has lots of useful calculators for PCB design (trase width, power dissipation, RF and analog signaling, much much more!)

  • This software is free. If it asks you for your name/email/phone number before taking you to the download page, you can just fill in random information (it doesn't make you confirm your email or anything)

• KiCAD documentation homepage

  • From this page, you can find all sorts of (very well written!) instructions about each part of KiCAD

  • Or, if tutorials videos are more your style, you can check out this playlist on Youtube. It's using an older version of the software, so some buttons or menus may have changed, but the core concepts are still the same.

The second part of designing a PCB is laying out components on the board and connecting them together with copper. Once again, there were no slides for this presentation; we continue with the schematic we created in part 1. 

Resource links:

• PCB Manufacturing capabilities

  • Different manufacturers have various capabilities for the precision, features, and materials they can use to produce PCBs. It's important to ensure that your design is manufacturable (called Design For Manufacturing, or DFM) as you're creating it. To do this, we use KiCAD's design rule settings to check our work and see if it meets our manufacturer's minimum capabilities.

  • JLCPCB Capabilities

  • OSH Park Capabilities

• JLCPCB KiCAD Template Project

  • You can use this KiCAD project as a template when starting a board layout. 

  • As we discussed in class, when you open the Board Setup menu, you can choose to Import Settings from Another Board, then select the template project file. After that, your Design Rules (and other board settings, such as custom design rule scripts) should be up to date with JLCPCB's capabilities. 

  • Of course, you'll first need to unzip the file when you download it and place the project folder wherever you keep your KiCAD projects saved!

  • We'll be using JLCPCB to manufacture the PCBs you design for your projects

• JLCPCB Tools KiCAD Plugin

  • This plugin provides some very useful tools for generating manufacturing files to send to JLCPCB for having your board made (and even assembled, if you like)

  • This one is slightly better than the other JLC plugin you'll find when you search in the plugins browser, however this plugin is not visible there by default. You'll have to add it's GitHub repository as a plugin source in the KiCAD settings before you can install it. To do this, follow the instructions on the plugin's GitHub page (ask Will if you need help getting the plugin installed!)