Babysteps_into_KiCAD

2023-03-16 - PCB Fabrication - KiCAD

There is a saying that there is no more permanent solution than a temporary one. That couldn’t be more true than when looking at my electronics projects. They are always some half baked idea that makes it’s way onto a breadboard which, if I liked it enough, possibly gets put onto protoboard [if its lucky]. However nothing has ever quite made it to being put on it’s own PCB [printed circuit board. you know. the green boards that you find inside stuff. like this ]. I have tinkered around a bit with designing one in the past, but it never was able to graduate from living on my harddrive. This week I took some steps to change that.

I spent a good amount of time this week getting a lot more familiar with KiCAD, an electronics design suite, doing quite a bit of research into fabricating a board in house [or in shed in my case], and ordering everything that I needed to get started.

If you would assume that most PCBs aren’t made in some guy’s garage, you’d be right [at least i hope not], most would be made in some fabrication facility that pump out tons of product in giant pallets [well, maybe not in the last three years]. Even hobbyists, like myself, can outsource a design to a board house for fabrication and I think most people would argue that this would be the way to go. Board houses have pretty quick turn around time [one to two weeks] and you get a really professional looking board. However, I am both sloppy and impatient meaning that A. there’s a chance I made a mistake on the design which means it won’t work after a two week wait or B. even if it does work, there’s a huge chance I forgot why I made the thing in the first place. Finding a workflow to make them in house would mitigate both these problems and if I end up with something I really like I can send it to a board house after I go through finding all the bugs [well… maybe just the bugs that make the thing not work at all].

The plan is to design something simple and use the toner transfer method to get the design onto a copper clad board. I’ll go into the whole process in a later post but seeing that I am already a day late I’ll throw this up and write up the outline for Monday’s post [we’ll see if I don’t get distracted].