
Tutorial On Designing/Building A PCB (Using FOSS) - ChrisGammell
https://contextualelectronics.com/gtb-kicad-4-0/
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kirrent
For those interested in the teaching philosophy behind contextual electronics
you might be interested in this video -
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_9Q4DoUlT8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_9Q4DoUlT8)

He favours diving into a teaching example where the student has little
background knowledge and expanding later. While my interests are more in the
fundamentals I can appreciate the motivation behind this approach, especially
in an online environment where keeping your students engaged is key.

~~~
nickpsecurity
That was an interesting presentation and theory. Might check out his learning
electronics series at some point.

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billylindeman
For those interested in pcb design and you're not tied to FOSS I'd definitely
recommend trying upverter.com. It's made loads of progress in the last few
years and is probably the best / easiest to use layout software for beginners
that I've come across.

I've worked with eagle, altium, and briefly KiCad but I can never get over the
tediousness of using KiCad. I recently checked out upverter and after watching
their tutorial was able to design an LCD adapter board from start to finish in
~2 hours.

Not trying to knock too hard on KiCad because it's great that we have an FOSS
option, but if you're just into tinkering, upverter definitely has an easier
learning curve and is pretty powerful. I always find that I want to spend my
tinkering time actually getting my project designed instead of fighting with
tooling.

~~~
Animats
KiCAD does seem to have a tediousness problem. The tutorial shows a process
for creating a new parts library which requires far too many steps - saving
some random part into a new library to create it, telling the part designer
about the new library, and starting from a blank part which has text in the
way of what you're creating.

Also, moving something by holding "M" and dragging with the mouse seems a
holdover from the DOS era. Of course, if you don't like that, you can remap
the hotkeys. That's so open-source.

~~~
mng2
Electronic CAD is tedium, honestly. Even the expensive stuff I use at work is
tedious, which is why we have a PCB layout department.

I haven't used KiCAD for several years, but in the past I used Rohrbacher's
Quick Library Builder [0] to generate parts. Otherwise making parts is indeed
a pain.

I enjoy KiCAD's single-key commands, though.

0:
[http://kicad.rohrbacher.net/quicklib.php](http://kicad.rohrbacher.net/quicklib.php)

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gbugniot
I guess KiCad is a good future proof solution for FOSS PCB design.

KiCad is now used intensively by CERN teams, and backup by them too.
[http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-
kicad/wiki](http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki)

See the KiCad CERN roadmap (10. is about UI):
[http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-
kicad/wiki/WorkPackages](http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-
kicad/wiki/WorkPackages)

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wyager
Having used Eagle, KiCAD, and several others, my current favorite is Fritzing.
It's quite easy to use and has a large library of built-in parts. Creating new
parts is pretty easy compared to other software I've used. Performance leaves
a bit to be desired, but this doesn't become a problem except for pretty large
circuits.

~~~
blackguardx
Out of all the open CAD packages, Fritzing takes the UI win but fails for
advanced users by only supporting 2-layer boards (unless this has changed?).

~~~
wyager
Nope, still two-layer only. I'm actually pretty disappointed with their PCB
UI. It makes a lot of assumptions about the existence of layers, and their
ambiguous selection is really bad. For example, I often cannot select a small
part for moving if there are too many airwires nearby, because fritzing always
seems to prioritize airwires. I end up having to disable the ratsnest layer
just to move a part. There's also a move vs create wire ambiguity that's
really annoying.

I guess I've just found that this is somehow less annoying than the problems
with other PCB softwares.

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zintagon
Fun project!

I watched the Building Blinky video.

You could improve the video if you hold a loupe in front of the camera lens
when trying to zoom in for fine detail, like when you were trying to show us a
bridge on two pins.

~~~
ChrisGammell
Good thinking, I like that. I normally zoom when for these kinds of details,
didn't realize at the time the view was not sufficient.

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beardicus
Hi Chris! Nice job with the tutorial and podcast. I haven't designed a board
in a while, but next time I do I'll definitely be putting in some time moving
from Eagle to KiCad.

~~~
taneq
Having made that jump over the past few months, I should warn you that KiCad
has some very annoying rough edges. It's basically a bunch of FOSS PCB-related
projects wedged together into a single launcher, which has then been spot
fixed as individual problems got too annoying for individual users. Once you
get used to it the main workflow is pretty alright, but there are a lot of
facepalm-worthy 'features'.

Each program has its own (sometimes slightly, sometimes wildly) different UI,
right down to things like selecting and moving objects. In addition, the PCB
layout component has three different selectable "rendering engines", each of
which has its own UI and available feature set inconsistent with the others.
(Hint: OpenGL rendering enables the interactive routing features which speeds
things up immensely.)

Information is transferred between programs via intermediate files, creating a
lot of busywork to export/import changes. (For instance, to go from a
schematic in eeschema to PCB ratsnest in pcbnew, you have to annotate
components, run CvPCB to associate components with PCB footprints, generate
and save a netlist, load pcbnew, and read in the netlist. Any name collisions
with existing footprints will cause the conflicted footprints to not be
updated.

Importing/vectorizing images from outside sources is byzantine and scaling
images after import is poorly or not supported.

It crashes from time to time, especially in the PCB editor. Get used to
spamming ctrl+s regularly.

Also, the part and footprint library management is insane and needs a rewrite.

Basically it's got all the ingredients for a great CAD package but it needs a
single guiding force to turn it into a consistent, reliable tool.

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svens_
Very nice introduction to KiCad - also for people with a background in other
CAD tools like me.

It's awesome to have a short but complete example of the whole process. KiCad
definitely has some room to improve in terms of UI/UX flow, so that was very
helpful.

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znpy
This is interesting to me because recently I have been playing with the open
source spice software, ng-spice, and all of the other tools.

I'll make sure to watch the whole series tomorrow morning :)

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throwaway7767
I'd love to hear from someone familiar with both KiCad and eagle how the
library availability compares. Last time I tried the FOSS alternatives, the
main pain point was that I needed to create pretty much all the component
libraries myself, whereas for eagle someone had usually already done that
work.

Eagle is a truly terrific program, but I would really like a FOSS alternative.
I'll have to give KiCad a try next time I have to do some layout work.

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dbcurtis
Just adding a note here that gEDA, the GNU EDA suite, is another free software
alternative. Its older than KiCAD by quite a bit. I got started with gEDA
since I was doing PCB's before KiCAD, and now have invested in tools and
libraries and such and don't want to restart. The functionality seems roughly
equivalent -- both have their rough edges, just in different places.

~~~
ChrisGammell
Yep, that's the thing about EDA. The curve is so steep, it's pretty hard to
get someone to switch unless there is a disruptive event in their electronics
life. I'll be saying the same some day about switching away from KiCad, I'm
sure.

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aceperry
Another free CAD program for pcb making is designspark pcb ([http://www.rs-
online.com/designspark/electronics/eng/page/de...](http://www.rs-
online.com/designspark/electronics/eng/page/designspark-pcb-home-page)). It's
not opensource like Kicad and gEDA, and it's only available on Windows. But
it's easy to learn, very polished for free software, and quite capable. Lots
of tutorials as well. There is a lot of free software available for
hobbyists/makers today and they're pretty impressive compared to commercial
software.

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srean
Sincere call for comments on make a living as a PCB designer in India.

~~~
anujdeshpande
Get your work out there.

\- Make small batches and sell on Tindie \- For bigger projects do a
crowdfunding on CrowdSupply (has a rep for OSHW)

It's easy for software folks to get noticed courtesy of GitHub or building
things which propagate faster than hardware (a simple script or emacs mode or
atom plugin or whatever). It's much harder for a hardware guy.

Look at [https://femto.io/](https://femto.io/). I think it is a small team
spinning boards in relatively small batches and selling them -
[https://femto.io/collections/all](https://femto.io/collections/all)

Also, there are a lot of makerspaces popping up in India. Showcase stuff there
too. There are a lot of software guys looking to do hardware stuff.

~~~
srean
Thanks for your comments.

Its not for me but for someone I know who was once very skilled in the art (I
myself am clueless about PCB matters). Wondering if starting PCB designing
again be a source of livelihood.

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callesgg
Watched the hole series more or less, feel a bit suckerd when the device did
not even work.

Put your wrists on something when you solder.

Long time Amphour listener.

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zakhomuth
Great work Chris! Looks awesome.

