How To Make Your Own Printed Circuit Boards (PCB)

this is a video that I'm really excited to share with you because it's something I'm really passionate and excited about in this video I'm going to show you how printed circuit boards are designed and made this is a really complex topic and I thought it would be kind of fun and interesting to sort of demystify the process of how these things are made first you create a schematic then you use that schematic to layout the board then you send it off for manufacturing if you've been watching any of my videos you know that I really like using this this is an Arduino Nano microcontroller the cool thing about the Arduino is that the design is open source which means that we can use the design files to create our own board so that's exactly what I'm gonna do in this video I'm gonna take the open source design files and recreate the Arduino Nano creating the schematic has nothing to do with the physical layout of the components the schematic really just determines how the components are electrically connected to each other I usually start by placing the main components in the schematic once I have the main parts placed I'll add things like the USB connector and the GPIO headers these green lines I'm drawing are called nets when you want two pins to connect to one another you place a net wire between them now we're completely done with the schematic and we get to move on to board layout this is my favorite part because you actually get to lay down the copper traces that connect all the parts together it's like a big giant puzzle and you have to figure out how to connect everything without having the traces run into one another when you open the board layout editor all of the component footprints are mashed together in a giant mess I need to spread them out and start grouping them together based on which components need to be connected together here you can see me start to place the microcontroller chip and all of the bypass capacitors these capacitors need to be as close to the microcontroller as possible so that it gets a nice clean voltage from the power supply as you'll see in a minute it's really important to spend enough time getting the components placed and routed in a way that makes it easy to route the copper traces between them failure to do this will make the next task much more difficult at this point all of the component footprints are placed on the board and we're ready to start placing the copper traces that connect them together if you're new to PCB design this probably still looks a little abstract one of the cool things about kicad in particular is that it has a 3d viewer the 3d viewer gives you a sneak peek of what your finished board will look like it can help you identify any placement problems that may be to visualize in the 2d layout now comes the fun part each of these white lines show two component pins that need to be connected together using a copper trace my job is to replace each white line with a copper trace until all the white lines are gone the red lines are copper traces on the top side of the board while the green lines are copper traces on the bottom side of the board the top and bottom layers can be connected using a copper plated hole called a via that is drilled through the board I took a PCB design class in school and my professor gave us an assignment designed to help us get better at routing these traces he gave us a really complex board with hundreds of components placed all around the board however none of the traces had been routed yet our task was to start routing these traces and take a snapshot of our progress at one-hour intervals after about 4 hours I had only completed a fraction of the traces on the board he didn't expect anyone to complete the entire board it was just an exercise to practice routing this is certainly a skill that requires a lot of practice to master ok this is really frustrating to admit but I think I got a little sloppy when I was placing the component footprints I was really focused on finishing this video and I didn't spend enough time thinking about the best location and orientation for each component this resulted in the copper traces getting really messy and I was having a hard time finding ways to route the copper traces without having them run into one another I'm going to have to delete all the copper traces I routed and find a better way to place these components I didn't take my own advice and now I'm paying the price by having to redo a couple hours of work okay here I go this is gonna be painful all right global deletion yes I'm sure I was able to improve the layout by moving and rotating some components around with just a few minor changes I started routing again [Music] all right the routing is finally complete this is looking so much better this time I'm really glad that I took the time to start over and do this right if we take another look at the 3d view we can see that this board is now looking pretty good however we have one more step we have to do before we can send this board off to the manufacturer we need to generate the Gerber files which is a set of files that gives the board manufacturer all the information they need to build our board now it's time to order the PCB online I'm going to use jlc PCB who also happens to be the sponsor for this video ordering PCBs at jlc PCB is easy you can upload your files and order boards in minutes with their self-service platform I have used many different board manufacturers over the years and jlc PCB is by far the most inexpensive option out there for $2 you get ten professionally made PCBs with a quick 48 hour turnaround I used to make my own PCBs from scratch not only did my DIY version not have a solder mask in silkscreen but the material cost in time actually made them more expensive than jlc PCB to learn more about how you can get a discount on your first order be sure to click on the link in the description I know I skimmed over a lot of detail here so if you have any questions about any of the steps in this process ask them below in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them I'll go ahead and post a couple of other videos here for you to click on that I think you may enjoy I make a lot of other project videos like this on my channel so if you enjoy that sort of thing please consider subscribing to Bitesize I really appreciate you taking the time to watch this video and I hope to see you next time [Music]

Channel: byte sized engineering

Views: 136,746

Keywords: printed circuit board, PCB, KiCad, DIY PCB, JLCPCB

Id: djBMQhjfbys

Length: 6min 10sec (370 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 22 2018