wow, I've been wanting a "PCB design system" like this for such a long time. I've always found it stupidly hard to just take an existing working board and tweak it.
Recently, I made an Arduino UNO that I showed to have better switching characteristics than a commercial board. It was a great project to help me understand how seemingly inconsequential routing practices can lead to issues down the line.
This is an amazing resource. It was difficult to appreciate what this resource was for until I tried to create my own boards based on an ESP32. It's not really difficult to build around ESP32, it's just that I don't know what I don't know. With starting points like these, I can start with a lot more confidence. Thank you!
I do workshops with kids occasionally. Last week, 4 13 year old boys. In this case I did breadboarding with them first and then showed them the transfer to fritzing -> breadboard -> schematic -> pcb. https://fritzing.org/ If you're looking for stuff they might find fun, logic noize (for instance https://hackaday.com/2015/03/09/logic-noise-sawing-away-with... ) has a bunch of fun cmos audio tutorials with great videos. Personally, I build audio toys, both analog and digital (mostly pi pico2) and still mostly use fritzing for the breadboard education element, but kicad if I need smd positioning and the like.
Neat project. These popular "commodity" devboard designs have been remixed and copied so much that it was just missing an open-source design to slot into many existing projects. I can imagine designing a board using one of these designs as a "template" but adding whatever capabilities I need, then knowing it fits a standard footprint.
Yeah, I've designed PCBs around PCBs—most recently around the LILYGO T-Display because it had an integrated LCD. I ended up adding my own DACs to the "mother" board though. It would be nice to have a single PCB that combined the best of both.
(I still wonder if I could compete on final cost though.)
Awesome! It's been a while, but my next level of learning was designing PCBs without breakout boards (and I had several failed revisions). This will be great to learn from.
This is great. One of my goals is "create my own ESP32 PCB" however I am lacking the knowledge to do so. I was hoping to get some help by an LLM but people here said it's not that great in PCB layout. Still I will try Kicad with MCP :)
Sure I am willing to learn but I need a more efficient path than a complete EE degree. I guess you can get quite far with a reference design but I understood that there's a lot to learn about ground layers, trace widths and so on.
One thing I learned the hard way is the antenna must not lie on your PCB! Even if it's just board without copper. I didn't see this stated anywhere, but once you look, every devkit is doing that, the antenna sticks over the PCB. When I had it on the PCB I had very bad connectivity and very high power usage.
I haven't made a ESP32 design, but I recently learnt KiCad and PCB design enough to do a RP235x board with a non-reference design choice (1.8v VDDIO). I only used the official hardware guide + LLMs for questions, and had it work on the first try - it wasn't too hard!
I have built one PCB with esp32-s3-wroom-1. Usb line is working and I can program the mcu module. However I could not make the ip5306 auto start on battery yet. And I am still unable to get audio from pcm5102a + pam8403 pipeline.
What I have well learned is It's a hard, time consuming and relatively expensive hobby.
I noticed these boards always use LDO with 5.5Vin max, why not use higher value like HT7533 (30V), it's only $0.02 more expensive and you can use it with 9V battery or 12V battery, or 2 lithium in series, or hack, even 4 fresh AAA are over the 5V limit. The other extreme is using *1117 LDO which has massive dropout like 1.1V which makes it them impossible to use with single lithium battery.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 41.6 ms ] threadhttp://www.simonjjones.com/#/posts/golden-arduino
I got them a 3d printer to move them into more "physical" computing, with mixed results.
Any place to have a gentle introduction to PCB boards?
(I still wonder if I could compete on final cost though.)
Sure I am willing to learn but I need a more efficient path than a complete EE degree. I guess you can get quite far with a reference design but I understood that there's a lot to learn about ground layers, trace widths and so on.
What I have well learned is It's a hard, time consuming and relatively expensive hobby.
Perhaps we could help each other?