How To Learn PCB Design (My Thoughts, Journey, and Resources) - Phil's Lab #87 

I graduated in mechanical engineering but my career path right out of school took a particular turn and I ended up starting to learn PCB design. This lead me down a rabbit hole and the RU-vid algorithm brought me to your channel. Thanks to you and many others, I now work as a hardware designer using Altium to design industrial embedded systems. Thanks again for your great work!

This channel is legendary. It fills the gap between what is not taught in college and the knowledge you need at the workplace.

The niche of PCB design might not be wide as millions but please keep making these videos. Trust me, there are people who don't waste a second clicking your video.

You, Robert Feranec, Rick Hartley, and Dave Jones have been the biggest help for me personally. Thanks for all that you guys do!!!

You just blew my mind. 30 years ago when I got my AAS in EET I had PCB design and manufacturer in every semester. We etched, drilled, and assembled a 2 layer board. Senior project pass was a fully functional PCB.

I'm a hobbyist and in the past 5 years I've created a number of different PCB's, most being used for simple sensors, WLED, etc. You don't need to be an EE. I start out on a perfboard to ensure that my ideas work, then design the PCB using KiCad and have it made by a reputable company. My PCBs sometimes take a few tries to get right, but it's still easier than trying to wire things together using jumpers. I've got a bin full of "oops", but keep them to remind myself of my mistakes. It's worth doing, and incredibly simple once you figure out footprints and spacing. And 5 boards for under $10 (inc shipping) is a good incentive. Keep in mind that the manufacturers will make EXACTLY what you tell them to make.

As an EE student, your channel is an incredibly valuable resource, and I owe you a lot of my understanding of PCB design. Thank you and keep up the good work. Greetings from Brazil!

First, thanks a lot for all the videos and knowledge you share. It was quite a relief to hear that you weren't taught PCB Design even at Cambridge. Myself, I had my electronics education in the 90's, 3 years at technical high school, then 2 years at a technical college, then 3 years at university level. All these years attending electronics classes. However, none of the courses I attended over these years taught us anything about PCB Design. I learned a lot about designing discrete circuits, amplifier designs, RF/antenna theory, maxwell's equations, filter calculations analog/digital, FIR responses and so on. But never anything about practical circuit/PCB design. What kept me not "missing out" on this was my home lab. I had a genuine interest in electronics as a hobby, and during the years I made my own small circuits at home. It started with a few soldering kits, then developed as I got my own etching tray and blank PCBs with photoresist film on, which I could produce myself. It took years to develop a process for printing traces on suitable transparent paper, UV exposure, dissolving and finally etching to get a good result. Double layer boards were especially hard to get right. But man, that hobby was worth it looking back now. Even if I don't work as an electronics engineer as my day job, it is still my hobby, and I am still able to design small projects from start to end. I don't think I would be able to do that if I only knew the theory from school. In addition, It's a lot easier now as we can order the boards online :)

Thank you very much Phil. I love your videos.

Keep up this great channel Phil! Your channel is one of the most comprehensive and wasy to follow on RU-vid and I expect it to get much more popular with time.

Thanks Phil! It's really helpful to see your learning journey and what benefited you to 'level up' your PCB skills. Really good comments about best practices. I think for new learners, that transition from copying a design to having the intuition of why something is implemented is difficult to navigate without the proper mentors/supports. I really appreciate that your channel helps fill the gap in this space as well!

Great video I can’t build right now but watching videos on new subjects I’m excited to try keeps me passionate about robotics :) and thanks for putting me on Rick

Dave Jones’ PDF is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.

Thank you again for making these videos. There is something really noble in providing for free knowledge that is so precious.

I'll go into EE next year and been an electronics hobbyist for the past few months, just found out this channel and it's amazing

Keep up the fantastic work, and please keep those videos coming. You're a real rockstar in the EE community! Cheers mate

I recently discovered this channel and as an indian Electronics and CS engineer this is THE best channel I have come accross period

really excellent, you break it down to the perfect level of detail. Thanks!

That's an incredible content. Fresh out of the ME undergraduate with little knowledge on PCB, I happened to land on your channel among others and since then I have never been the same. The design practices that you put across have largely helped me to becoming a professional designer. You are my MENTOR!! Kudos for the content that I can only access as long as I'm connected to the internet. Sooner than later RU-vid will be a school if it's not yet there. Looking forward to more content.

This was incredibly helpful. Thank you for doing this, it is always hard to find a consolidated source that provides the information you are looking for especially for a beginner. I have a MSEE and totally agree with you in that current curriculums don't include any PCB design courses. So a lot of it is you learn as you go and by doing. PCB design is definitely a skill I want to learn and get more advanced in, so I look forward to this challenge and to following your videos and recommendations. Take care!

Hey Phill, very good content ! i have one tip for you and anybody who see this comment. from the PCB manufacturing POV, it may not be a good ideia to use silkscreen on small pitch designs if you choose to have the board assembled by a machine at the factory. the problem is that during solder paste part of the process, the stencil don't fully touch the PCB if you have silk on it, thus leaving a small gap between the stencil and the PCB. it could cause the paste to fill these gaps with more material and shorting the pins during reflow oven process. it is always recommended to avoid using silk, specially if you have very small components or pin pitch. put the labels on copper instead. Thanks for the amazing content !

Thank you this is amazing, I am electronics hoppiest and I did many pcbs Thanks to people like you 😊

Great tips! I love the references, they will be incredibly useful!

Excellent video! I mentioned you in my last video as you have the same ground-up process that I try to convey to my users and you are an excellent resource. I will be mentioning this video and others you create as your videos are quite complementary to the subject I teach. Thank you for making such clear and succinct videos.

I'm currently studying EE and we don't have any PCB course either. However, a teacher encouraged us to design one for a particular project. I followed along your STM32 design using KiCad and made my first PCB design a couple of days ago :) Looking forward to your other videos. Thanks for the good content! Greetings from Venezuela!

Another great video. Sharing of resources is always a plus!

Brilliant job Phil always learn so much from your detailed tutorials. This is a great resource for getting into PCB Design.

I love your videos! Please keep doing what you are doing. It is inspiring and I have learned so much!

Thanks for this! Your channel has been very helpful, and it’s highly appreciated 🙏

What I miss is the maths and knowledge needed to design the circuit. I'm reading "The Art of Electronics" and "Practical Electronics for Inventors" to get started

Just wanted to say thank you I’ve been using your videos to learn over the last year and now I’m hosting PCB workshops at my college through a club pulling in over 30 people each time and now a bunch of cool projects with PCBs are starting up around campus! All using Altium student licens

Your comments section is filled with inspiration. I want to switch my career from computer science to electronics soon.

amazing introduction. very insightful

Thank u very much Very informative... your journey teaches young inspiring designers a path to follow

Thanks a lot for your valuable infos that you provide ❤❤

Finally a really good introduction to this!

Hi Phil, I follow your videos and lessons from long back. Always been great source of information. Due to my poor financial background, I was not able to enroll in expensive course. But your videos definitely filling those gaps. Thanks you and keep creating such awesome videos for all people, who really want to learn. -Kd nayar

Thanks Phil! Really inspiring video. Currently at Cam in my 4th year with no PCB experience. This is about to change!

I'm surprised to hear PCB Design is so rare in EE courses. My university was pretty heavy on it with the very first semester having the assignment of creating whatever we wanted on a self-etched board that goes on a magnetic wall (which had copper strips supplying 5V to the boards) and every project afterwards all had some aspect that required PCB design to realize or to even hope to function. At graduation that very first assignment would be activated once more and then returned as a parting gift. It now hangs on my Fridge! ^^ Guess i'm very lucky to have gotten an education that was given by a group that were engineers first, Professors second. These days i keep designing and having PCBs made constantly as i keep learning new things. There is something about your creations coming alive that never gets old. I've also started to teach myself Mechanical engineering so i can wield the prevalence of 3D-Printing and open some very exciting new doors. Currently migrating all my old work to KiCad. Was taught in Eagle during university, but with its limitations and imminent deprecation it would be unwise to start a major project with it.

Nice info, well done, thanks for sharing it with us :)

As mechatronicas student, you are legend and I learn a lot from ur videos, and this video is so helpful because I want to learn pcb design but I'm lost in middle of the ocean and don't know from where I should start but this video helps to find a track to start

Great video Phil!

Nice video! There's a step in between ordering PCB's and the manual boards in my opinion. It's DIY routed boards. If I need a quick prototype, I usually just put a blank PCB on my CNC router, and make it. It's not as hard as it seems once you get the hang of it - and even (extremely cheap) CNC3018 routers are capable of doing this quite nicely. It's primarily useful for partial designs that don't have to last. Yes, soldering is much trickier, and double sided PCB's are especially tricky - but the turn time is just a few hours which makes it incredibly fast. Not only that, but it's much easier to route a complex board than making it on a breadboard. That being the case, as you pointed out as well, there's a limit to how complex these kinds of boards can be. One thing that I would like to know a bit more about, and you might know, is what you can test BEFORE sending things to the factory. You can only be so careful... there are so many "rules", especially with high speed design, and everything seems to interfere with each other in some unexpected way. Perhaps I'm just paranoid, usually my PCB's seem to break in unexpected ways... but still, it's good to get advice on this? Or is it just that KiCAD doesn't support things like this, and more professional tools like Altium do? Other than the tips that you give, I notice that I spend a lot of time on LCSC just reading up on data sheets, especially on IC's that I haven't seen yet. Just to get the "lay of the lands". I'm wondering, would you recommend this practice as well? Or do you consider this an utter waste of time? :-)

Same here. EE degree with zero PCB content. We did a lot of breadboards in labs, but no PCB. Then again, making PCBs in the early 80s wasn’t quite as trivial as it is today. 😁

I'm just a CS person that got into this as a hobby, it's crazy that they don't teach this in EE programs. Thanks for the helpful suggestions and resources!

Thanks for so many highly educational content, so to speak. :)

Great video! Lots of interesting insights

Hi Phil, I just come across your channel and it is by far the best place to be with regards to PCB design. I have so many ideas however, to bring them to market, it is difficult to find the right information needed to progress. As you said, even Cambridge University doesn't cover PCB design. Maybe there is a little niche for you. But for now, I will enjoy following you on your path to hopefully learn a lot from you. Thanks for sharing

Did breadboards, did DIY kits, did some SMD. But now I want my own stuff and it is hard as hell. Reading through endless datasheets and specs, trying to make certain that what you did is valid (my first amp nearly brought the house down in a bad way).

I still had and will learn from you Sir. THX

So true, you go through four to five years of technical university, learn design and mathematical acrobatics complex numbers and laplace, and EMC. I remember I had like an hour of PCB design, in four years. Crazy as a junior engineer I had to do layout, and quickly learn that designing circuit and layout the same circuit are not the same thing. Tnx for the vids they help.

You are an Angel wrapped in human flesh for these lessons!

Thank you so much Phill.

5:00 Speaking from my own experience at Berkeley 25 years ago: Electrical engineering was... _weird._ In our first year, we were taught analog stuff like using relays, passives, and BJT transistors to make an obstacle-navigating robot. If we had even a primitive Arduino, that lab would have been child's play. In the exact same course, we were taught how ICs were made from silicon at the nanometer scale. There were brief mentions by some of the professors about how "you shouldn't do this or that with the conductors or there's going to be weird stuff happening", but nothing that would really inform how you'd lay out a PCB.

Thank you Phil!!! it is really a good video and I learn a lot from your mix-signal design course. PCB designer is an important element of project, while dealing with MCU, FPGA on the board are also necessary. That would be nice if you can also share your experience on this. (I am struggling with it)

Thanks Phil, you're the best

Very useful, as ever. Greetings from icy Cambridge.

i started with fritzing since fritzing lets you begin a design where ever and they have a breadboard simulation type. So i would 1/1 copy my real life breadboard test setup into fritzing, that gave me the schematic parts and so i would make the schematic and then the pcb. But the pcb design on fritzing is a bit limiting so these days i tend to use easyeda which so far does the things i need it to do. And just copy past stuff from other my first projects where super simple so i pretty naturally fell in to it and so far I find pcb designing pretty easy even the more complex stuff, if you just do it step by step its and keep the basic rules in mind. I like to see vids from robert feranec very nice indepth vids like this channal has.

Really thank you

You are doing gods work

I've gotta be honest, man. I've actually seen the opposite of standalone PCB designers. A lot of the older EE guys that I have worked with don't know PCB design. They all are used to just scribbling out a schematic on a piece of paper and then handing it off to the PCB guy. All of the younger guys all do their own designs. I've even seen the dedicated PCB guys retire and have their position eliminated. It actually makes a lot of sense because it was a whole ordeal back in the days before CAD when they had to use tape and a drafting table. Maybe it's different across the pond.

Just when we needed this! Currently as a EE student, always felt this lack in the curriculum, but surprised even cambridge doesnt include this

Great, awesome video as always. Phil, when you get assembly services from pcbway or jlpcb, are the used parts genuine? Im working in a stm based project and a little worried about getting a non genuine part (like these cheap blue pill that aren't recognized by the mxcubeide). Thanks from Brazil!

amazing videos! Something I have seen a lack of knowledge overall is about custom TTL or LVDs screen interfaces or bridges, e.g., HDMI to mipi dsi. I know most is because of closed-source docs but there must be a way for entry designers to make our boards with off-the-shelve screens without buying bulky bridge boards. I'll appreciate any help with where to start, I've been searching with no luck.

Seeing other's progress reminds me to take it slow and be easy on me and not get disappointed! Thanks :) I'm also thinking of starting a company out of an idea i had for a sensor, but I have no techy friends and i'm so lost on where to sell it or how to, and where to get them assembled as it's hard to make boards at home?

Thanks for the advice. Great video as always! My university didn’t teach PCB design properly as well. They just mentioned 45 degree traces and ground plane but nothing else.😂 I did not know that I can get design review on the sub-reddit before. My design looks really amateur compared to what has been shown in your video so far as I was somehow trapped inside my comfort zone. Progressing by designing development board with more advanced CPU or complex circuit might be good but i still need to find a good reason for those design. Practice could be the best one in my case.

Thanks for videos, it's very useful, I start to design MCU circuit, what's the most important to interface between MCU with other IC that make me right choose right IC with MCU and about connection between them

I’m building Ben Eater’s 65C02 project and cutting and stripping all the wires has me wanting to skip straight to PCB design

I learn PCB design with your videos

I wanted to try and make my own retro handheld but having hard time wrapping my head around how to start putting this is in a pcb design. I got a raspberry pi and was thinking on making a pcb for the actual controller/buttons, but probably doesnt make sense to have both. This vid is great anyway, i will check your videos and starting putting pieces together

thank you very much!!

The sentence at 8.30 was enough for a sub for me. 👍

As an EE student, we had no PC design course. Had to teach myself how to do PCBs.

I think your channel has been a great resource for me. Your Kicad video got me to switch to it from Eagle (It was a great tool but I hate its integration with Fusion 360). I've been wanting to do my first 4 later board with an integrated MCU, but sadly the supply shortage is the thing that's been hard to really finish a design since its gonna be a long time to get a board manufactured.

Fantastic! I was wondering if you had any recommendations for learning the very basics of the electronics that go into your pcb? I recently found the joy of soldering by making my own studio microphone from a kit, but I've been having difficulty trying to find a good place to start learning about how it all works. I'd very much like to design and build my own (minus the true condenser capsule), but with the exception of changing an outlet in my home my knowledge is dated to what I learned 20 years ago in high school.

Hi Phil, I am Final Year EE Student, Part time offering Hardware Design services and I must admit, I have watched Every Single Video of Yours (Incl. Your Guitar Vids :) ). It would be really really awesome if you make a video Explaining. How to gather resources and docs about a project that is completely new to you? I mostly struggle finding the right resources for schematic. Many Thanks

Thank you for your very informative presentation. Will learning this skill helps in a career of repairing computer circuit boards. primarily motherboards? Do you see a growing market for it?

Can you do a 100 watt led mcpcb & led driver design aswell

Could you do a series on FPGA design using KiCAD? Your Altium-based series was extremely useful, but I'd like to see how well it translates to KiCAD before taking the plunge.

I remember the time when it was an alcohol marker or masking tape on pcb and HCl and H2O2. Fun times.

helpful how to learn pcb design

Awesome would love to see a beginner course from you! Would even pay for it 99$

I think one reason universities don’t offer many PCB design courses is that they are somewhat hard to incorporate in courses. Designs that are not produced aren’t that useful and if you need them for a project course the PCB must be finished at least a week before the deadline, so the last three weeks of lectures can’t really be incorporated either. It’s only really been possible in long running projects at my university. Generally universities also don’t try to prepare you for a trade, but teach you in an academic setting. That is however besides the point

I find KiCad pcb design tutorials very helpfull. I can’t afford Altium as a hobbyist.

Hi Phil thanks for the great video - at 6:42 is lab #11 taken down? tried search and reverse date sorted on your channel and it didn't seem to be there. Was there an update that superceeded it?

Hi Phil. Any update on the Advanced PCB course with the FPGA you were planning to release? Any chance it will be released before Christmas? That would be awesome. Thank you in advance.

I have almost no knowledge about electrical engineering. I studied theoretical mathematics and worked as a software engineer. In recent days, I am also doing some embedded programming in my private project. I learned a bit Kicad, but I don't know what components I should use at all.

Hi Everyone, Thanks Phil for the videos! And it’s really true what you’ve said about university and PCB design 😢. Is there any courses that helps to learn this a perfect way? Like when and why do I use the passive components? Like decoupling caps for example or what are the rules I need to follow when I‘m doing my layout.. thanks for your help 😊

I LOVE being an Electronics Engineer by trade. It just sucks that it appears to be (at least in Australia) such an underpaid industry.

Is there an updated link to the PCB pdf from Dave Jones?

wow i can't believe even Cambridge don't teach PCB layout in bachlor. I thought that was only a trend in low rank college to hold students in college longer for master.

Hi Phil, I've been following your videos and wanted to ask if you have any advice for people looking to develop boards and sell on a small to medium commercial scale

Hello! I'm very interested to watch you, can you do a full course on Altium Desigher like you did for Kicad? I would gladly buy it. Another question, can I send you an EasyEda project for evaluation?

a very interesting video Phil. That uni pic, was it gym or mcdees?? :D

I switched from software focus to hardware. I hope I can find passionate EE people to study together. But there are not many around me. Wonder if there is any study group for EE on social media !

What do we need Universities for when we have Phil's Lab?

Can we know when your course would be available? And thanks for your videos man!

im here because when looking for jobs in construction electrical design ive come across electrical pcb design jobs and they pay much better. i want to learn this now

Anyone looking for that 3 hour video at 6:33? I can't seem to find it in his channel.

Hi Where to best buy the components ?