Design your own Circuit Boards using Kicad Part 1 (FREE software)

have you ever wanted to design your own custom circuit boards like I have here or maybe you got as far as downloading some design software for it and found it too difficult and daunting to use well in this video series I'm going to show you start to finish how I design my circuit boards give you some tips and tricks along the way and all the software I use is 100% free to download and use if you end up purchasing some custom-made PCBs consider using jlc PCB because they help sponsor the content on my channel and make videos like this possible this video is proudly sponsored by jlc PCB who offer high-quality PCBs at very affordable prices they offer fast production time as quick as 24 hours from ordering to your order being shipped worldwide and ordering is as simple as uploading your Gerber file and choosing your design preferences order five PCBs from as little as $2 so the program I'm going to be using is called Chi CAD it's a free to download and use application and it's available on Mac Windows and Linux so go ahead and choose one download it and install it and then come back to this video so now you've got Coquette installed we need to start off by making a new project so we click on file new project and I like to create a new folder for each of my projects to store them in so I'm going to call this one help to make PCB and then I'm going to save my project file in that new folder I've just created so here's our new project and the first thing we need to do is edit the dot s CH file short for schematic by double clicking on it and that opens up the schematic editor now I feel really new to the world of electronics and aren't familiar with what a schematic is here is a typical example of a basic schematic a schematic shows the components within the circuit their values and also the electrical connections between those components so here I have a schematic for a 555 timer that's used to blink an LED on and off and this is what I'm going to replicate in this video tutorial so the first thing to do is add in all the components we're going to be using in our circuit so to add components to a schematic we need to click on place symbol and then left click somewhere on the schematic and that will load the included default library now the included library in Koyuk head is pretty extensive and will certainly contain most components that you'll be using if it doesn't contain a component you want to use you do have the option of manually drawing the component creating footprints and so on and I will be showing you how to do that in a later video but it's a bit beyond the scope of this video so we'll be just focusing on the components that are available within the Coquette library so there's two ways to find components now let's say I wanted a diode I could just scroll down to diode list and then scroll through the many options that are available but that can take quite a lot of time so it's much quicker to use the second method which is just to use the search function so I need a 555 timer so just put in five oh five and the first one will do me just fine and to place a component we just left-click you can use the scroll wheel to zoomin and now I need some resistors for some components like resistors and capacitors it's not necessary to find the exact value of resistor you need so for an example we might need a 1000 ohm resistor you won't find that in the component list you just find a symbol for a resistor because we'll add in that value later to move a component place your cursor over it then press M on your keyboard and then you can move that component if you wish to move multiple components drag a box over as many components as you wish to move let go and then you'll be able to also move the components that way to rotate a component simply place your cursor over it and then press the letter R on your keyboard you can also use the same method for rotating values and names of components if you want to copy a component or multiple components drag a box over them hold down ctrl and press C and then hold down control and press V and you can just copy and paste as many components as you want so for my schematic I need three resistors so go ahead and copy and paste my resistor I also need an LED that one will do fine and I need a capacitor so now I have all my components added in I need to edit the field references now what is the field reference well you'll notice on all the components they'll have a letter followed by a question mark so you question mark question mark this is where we need to add unique field references and to do that we're going to double click on the name and when I choose to name this resistor r1 r2 and r3 I'll also do the same for my 505 timer my capacitor and my LED taking a look at the schematic I'm replicating you'll see r1 has a value of four hundred and seventy thousand Owens so I'm going to give my resistor r1 the same value the capacitor is 1 micro farad so I'll do the same for my capacitor now all the components have unique field references and their correct values so now we need to move and place my components and a layout where I have short wire runs and wires cross crossing each other willy-nilly making a great big ugly mess that's hard to read and understand so I'm going to move my components around and place them in an order that makes sense so once you're happy with your component layout we need to start adding in electrical connections so I'm going to go up here and click on place wire and you'll notice on all the components so there are these little circles where we can add electrical connections so I'm going to start off by left clicking over here and then left click on this component and you can see that places are wire and those circles disappear it when they have a connection to them so the next connection I need to make is between r2 and pen 7 but if I drag a electrical wire across my other connection you might be wondering if those two wires are now connected where they cross and no they're not even though they overlap each other they are not electrically connected I'll show you what we're what it would look like if they were if you see a green circle where two wires intersect that confirms that they are electrically connected if they wires cross over and just look like that they are not electrically connected then my schematic I need to connect our one over here to this point here now I can do that by just simply dragging another wire we give the little green circle indicating that all three of those connections are joined but there is another method of adding multiple electrical connections between components that don't involve was so get rid of those wires and we're going to come over here and click on place global label and if we left click on the schematic it opens up the global label properties I'm just going to call this one and hit OK and then we get this little label we can rotate it by pressing R and I'm going to add it to my connection points we can also copy the label and I'll place one over here and I'll place one over here now even though there isn't a visual wire going between these three connections because these component connections share the same global label all components with the global label 1 are all electrically connected and this can be quite useful in schematics that have tens if not hundreds of components and placing wires just as an option because it would just get so messy no one would be able to read it so it's a great method to use when you have a lot of components that need a lot of electrical connections if you're running a wire and need to run it around other components you can lift click to pin the wire and then you can drag out from that position and you can draw any shape that you need using the Smith it just left-click to pin the wire in place so at this point I've got all my electrical connections between all of my components but I am missing a way of supplying power to my circuit now in this case circuit requires a nine volt power source so what I like to do for my power inputs is you screw down terminals so we can look for a symbol for that and so I'll go back to place symbol and I'll search for screw and here we get a list of all the screw down terminals so I just need a positive or negative connection for my power input so I'll choose a 1 by 2 hit OK and place that symbol and rename it to j1 and I don't need a field value so I'm just going to make that invisible and I'm gonna rotate it and move it so my terminal has two connections one for ground and one for positive now there's no right or wrong way of which pin should be which so I like to define those by adding text to my schematics so I'm just going to click on the place text button and I'll just add a plus symbol you can change the size the text and I'll make it bold I'm gonna make pen to positive do a minus symbol and pen 1 can be negative and you can also be real fancy and like 5 volt input and add that so that you know that terminal is your power and put for the circuit so now we can start adding electrical connections wherever we need power supplied and wherever we need a ground connection but as you can see if I had many many components that needed many ground connections and positive connections it would start getting pretty complicated pretty quick so there is a cleaner method of adding power to your circuits so I'm going to go over to place power port I'm going to open up the power options and I'm going to scroll down until I find a 9 volt power symbol hit OK and what this means is wherever I place this 9 volt symbol these are all electrically connected similar to the global label that we created over here wherever there is the 9-volt symbol even though they might not be a wire visually connecting those two points they are both electrically connected now we can do the same for our ground connections and a scroll down until we find ground at okay and then I can start adding ground connections wherever I need ground connected so all these points are electrically connected so now my schematic is complete I've got all my components and they are all connected now there is just one last job to do and that is to define the footprints of all the components I'll be using so what is a footprint well if we think for a moment that this is a symbol for a resistor we've defined its value but we haven't yet defined what size resisted we're going to be using in the real world and that's what a footprint is so I'm gonna use my to weight M and all over here as an example and we're going to look up the manufacturers data sheet for the terminal I'm using and we're going to look at what footprint we need to assign to my terminal in the schematic so this is the data sheet for the two-way terminal I'll be using and what I really need to know is the spacing between each of the pens this is called the lead pitch or sometimes just pitch and it can be abbreviated by just the letter P so here we have a top-down view of the pens at the bottom of the terminal and you can see that the pitch is 5.08 millimeters so now I need to define the footprint for my terminal so I'm going to move my cursor over the component I want to change the footprint off and then hit the letter F on my keyboard and at the moment you can see that there is no footprint assigned to this component because the text field is blank so I'm going to hit select and that opens up the footprint library so here is where we can browse all the footprints that are available so I'm going to scroll down and I'm going to click on terminal block now some of the options here apply to specific brands of components but quite often you'll find these footprints are universal for instance this one's abbreviated to be a two-way terminal and you can see we have pitch equals 5.0 millimeters which is exactly the terminal I'm using and if we click on it we get a preview of what the footprint looks like so I'm going to double click that to select it we can see the text field is now occupied and it is correct so I'm going to hit OK and that is the footprint defined for the terminal so now I'm going to define the footprint for my resistor click on resistors and you notice here we've got two options resistor is MD and resistor tht the SMD is surface mount and the tht is through-hole which is what I'll be using and now we can browse through the many available options for different footprints for resistors so for your bog-standard garden variety half watt metal film resistor I know that this is the right footprint for me the component length is six point three millimeters the diameter is two point five millimeters and the lead the lead pitch is ten point one six millimeters so I'll go ahead and double click on that one now because I'm using three resistors all with the same footprint what I can do is go ahead and highlight the text copy it and close that and what I can do is copy and paste the text for the footprint and the other resistors I have and that's a quicker way than looking up the footprint for each individual resistor so this is the 555 timer I'll be using in my circuit and I could look up the datasheet to find the footprint for it but melzack only supply the basic information on the front page so if we look under package slash case we can see the footprint is packaged at 8 and if I open up the footprint library and go to packaged up and then look for DEP 8 there is the socket for the 555 timer I want to use and there's also a couple of different options I could also have long pads which are slightly easier if you hand solder in it that's what I'm gonna go with thanks I'll look up the footprint for my led so that will be an LED through hole diameter is five millimeters and there's one I need and lastly my capacitor so now all my components have footprints assigned to them now we can generate the netlist so I'm going to click up here at generate netlist click on generate netlist and make sure it's saving it in the directory you want us it's under my folder how to make PCB so I'm happy about that so I'll just hit save so this point we're all done with the schematic so the final thing to do is to save our work and then we can close the schematic editor in the next video I'll show you how to design the circuit board and generate the necessary files to have your circuit board put into production if you found this video useful please give it a like and click the link in the top right corner to watch the next video in the series

Channel: Schematix

Views: 48,722

Keywords: how, to, make, design, circuit, board, PCB, JLCPCB, software, Kicad, build, gerber, files, schematic, schematix, tutorial, free

Id: sEGyNfBuPig

Length: 18min 4sec (1084 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 10 2019