As a someone who uses KiCAD extensively for last few years on quite advanced level I would recommend this video to any novice who is asking me about on how to make their own PCBs. Its short, no BS and up to the point. Great job of putting that much content in such compact 20 min timeline! Other tubers releasing a series of videos like "KiCAD...Part.1", "...Part 2".,"... Part ..." - f..k that. This one is just what KiCAD newbie needs!
thanks, yeah sometimes there’s no need to split everything up into separate modules just to get more views, I just try to do what makes sense but sometimes I fail as well!
When your group of parts appear in the PCB Editor from the netlist, the group is known as a "rat's nest" from the old days of OrCad. I think Eagle still calls it that as well, and it is a term that fits.
@Gadget Reboot At 12:27 you mentionned you do as much as you can on top side. Why? Personnally, especially for a through-hole board like this one, I normally do the opposite for two reasons. First, if we ever have to repair something defective, unsoldereding will be a bit easier with traces on the component side. For unpatient people, polling out an incorrectly unsoldered chip won't peel off the traces that would be routed on top and still sticked-soldered to a pin pulled off. Second, I am not proud to say it but if there is an error in the design and I need to do a patch where I will need to cut a trace and/add a jumper wire, it will be much less apparent and less ugly to have it *under* the board than on the top. But that's my humble opinion.
mostly I end up using surface mount components so automatically I have traces on the top side anyway and I try to minimize any vias that may come into play with signal integrity or even power delivery where I just want the most direct path possible, especially if impedance control is necessary. I try to keep a solid copper ground area in case it’s needed for any sensitive analog things mostly and some chips have recommended layout guidelines to keep any ground planes away from the sides of any signal traces where it may create a coplanar wave guide if it’s on the same layer near a signal trace. so keeping all of that ground on the bottom and the signal on top is some thing I learned to do. I always found that if I was going to have any trouble removing components, I would probably end up damaging pads or traces no matter what side they are on but ever since I started using a vacuum desoldering tool, it’s not even a concern anymore. Much better than using a screwdriver wedged under an ic trying to heat up all the pins with an iron.
This video someone else made might help. I am going to try it myself. I did it a few years ago but I forget how. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-VEf9hRK-8o0.html
Great videos! I started using Kicad to design guitar pedals and wondering if you know what footprint you would use for a simple audio jack The Jack will obviously be off board , so I just need two holes. Thanks!
In the footprint library there's many "connector" categories where footprints can be found for adding headers, like connector_wire has some solder pads that can be placed where needed and connector_pinheader_2.54mm has standard header pins which can also be used for wire soldering or adding a standard header strip to plug into.
Hello Thank you for your video. While i created a design in Ki Cad 5.1and after annotating the design, I tried to add footprints to the schematic symbols but it keeps displaying "failed" and no symbols found. Please can you guide me?
Is it a new installation starting in version 5 or was it updated from version 4? Originally I had version 4 but never used it, then I updated to 5 to start using it and it had all kinds of problems trying to find things so I deleted everything and installed a new version 5. Is it saying it can't find symbols (schematic parts) or footprint libraries can't be loaded? I remember it couldn't load my footprint libraries until I installed it all fresh. Is the schematic drawn new by you or something you got online? If someone else used parts that aren't in your own library and you don't have a copy of the parts to load, it can give problems. Otherwise does this help: forum.kicad.info/t/how-can-i-assign-a-footprint-to-a-symbol/8901
@@GadgetReboot hello, thank you for your reply. I have installed version 5. The schematic that I have drawn is my own design but as you said I just installed the kicad again and actually after manual library assignment it is working now. Ty.
And I got a second one on the end too. I’m not even mad, it’s interesting to watch a promo of their tech even if I’ll never buy it, like those occasional industrial CNC or conveyor belt or bottling machine ads I get. KiCAD is by far the best piece of FOSS I’ve ever used, so it’s got my respect. I think it’s made by the guys at CERN.
I remember when people were relying on Eagle which I think was still limited in board size and number of layers so this is a big step up. Open source is great and I wish this was more common 20 or 30 years ago in the hobby community. I remember using things like Turbo Pascal 4 for DOS or something and I might need to use somebody’s code to do something like serial port modem access but I could only use it as a compiled include unit and it would force nagging banners and basically ruin the user experience and I couldn’t tweak it if I needed and it was actually more of a hassle to use something that was given away for free.
As if a kicad user is going to think 3k or more is ok, and buy it. Used to use Altium at work great program but not for hobbyist . I found kicad after using Design Spark pcb from rs components, seems to do everything I need. Great video and nice bit of gadgetry rebooting;)
Can you SHOW me how to start off with the ground plane first, on the pcb? ALL on one side of the pcb! No one can make a video and show me how to do this. Is it that hard to do? The circuit has 50 components.
Not sure what the question/problem is and I can't remember what was covered in the video so going from scratch I just launched PCBNew to start a new board, version 5.1.2-1, I click the icon for Add Filled Zones, or from the file menu: Place/Zone, then click somewhere in the work space and a menu comes up called Copper Zone Properties. If it's a single sided PCB I'll probably put copper on bottom so I click B.Cu in the Layer box for where to place the copper zone. Since I don't have a design to route and there's no netlist from a schematic, I only have a choice of in the list that I can connect the copper to so I just go with that and OK everything to get out of the dialogue. Now I just click around the work space to create the shape I want and double click when I'm done to fill in the copper area. Later if I want to change something like the shape or the net it's assigned to, when the mouse cursor is just in the normal pointer mode I can click on the outline and it will highlight, then I can move the shape points or type E to get back into the original property edit box and change the layer it's on or net it's assigned to.
After loading the netlist with the tool shortcut icon or menu Tools/Load netlist, all the nets in the design should now show up in that Copper zone properties config menu for the drawn copper area, so go into that edit property menu for the copper zone and choose the ground net. Then any pins that belong to that net will auto connect when a part is placed inside the copper zone, unless routed tracks cut up the copper zone too much, which is where a double sided board allows more ways to connect to the copper area with vias. As parts are moved around or traces routed, the filled in copper area may need to be refreshed by typing "b" to redraw, I think that's the key. And there's buttons to toggle if the copper is shown filled in or just vacant to make it easier to see other things because sometimes it gets in the way.
Three days watching video and reading help files. Then uninstalled this crap and made my UHF components PCB in 15 minutes. Yes , you have to draw, drill, etch .
I etched my first PCB using ferric chloride and an etch resist pen from RadioShack in the 80s. I’m glad I don’t have to do that anymore and dispose of the chemicals. I use this software twice a month now and I’ve used it for the past four years.
Oh. Guess I won't be designing my own pcb with kicad. I'm a 4th year engineering technology student and I'm DONE with learning the nuances and idiosyncrasies of yet another piece of junk software.