KiCad Tutorial - How to neaten up your schematic!

hey guys welcome to another video on kicad tutorials in this video i'm going to speak about giving us tips about what to do on your schematic to make it easier for someone else to review your work so on discord and instagram lately i've been getting a lot of requests to look at yoga schematics which i don't mind at all i like helping you guys but sometimes it's a bit difficult just the way the schematics laid out and i just want to give some tips to make it easier for for anyone to ask anyone to review the work you have to remember that you when you spend time on a schematic you are spending maybe days weeks months on that schematic when you give it to someone they first time they look at it it's the first time they see it that another background that you have on the project so i'm going to give you five tips just to help make it easier for your reviewer because pcb design is difficult you don't really want to do everything by yourself you can make mistakes so i highly advise you to get your stuff reviewed by friends by colleagues um or not if you're on a discord please send it to us we will have a look at it and i'll try to help where i can but so these are just five tips so you can update your schematic to make it easier for me to review or anyone else enjoy and let me know if this helps if it does help please thumbs up like subscribe all that awesome stuff and what other tips do you guys think about is helpful for a pc designer to do so that someone else can review the work because reviewing work on pcp designs is very important enjoy the first step i have to make a schematic readable reviewable easier for the other guy to look at and try to help you is do not cross lines do not cross wires what i mean about that i've been reviewing a lot of schematics from the community lately and i see people love to connect wires to each other even if they don't have to what i mean by that is if i look in my ground over here i make a ground symbol where all my grounds are so instead of this i see a lot of people doing this where they'll take a wire and they will start crossing like this and this is also ground so we don't need this ground and they will connect it like this and this becomes very difficult and tedious to review as a person who doesn't know the schematic so as you can see that just doesn't look as nice as this so my first tip is when you use ground in vcc use the power ports so keycard to get to the powerpoint ports you just push p and it will load and then you can see power so you make use of these power symbols instead of crossing wires you don't want wires to run from one part of schematic to another it gets very difficult to review if i've got plus three volts here plus three volts here they are connected by name ground background are connected by name so keep that in mind when you are making schematic that you want other people to look at so my first tip is don't cross wires keep it as simple and as neat as possible the second thing i want to talk about is decoupling caps so what i've seen lately a lot of people are doing is putting the decoupling caps like this in series with the 3.3 volts we cannot do that as capacitors don't allow any dc voltage to go through only ac so when you put a capacitor like this you're actually blocking the 3 volts 3 to go into your vdd so what other people also do with the decoupling investors is they start connecting it like this which is fine of course technically there's nothing wrong with that but having it this close makes it difficult to read as well so this is just a preference but what i advise is to put your decoupling pesters on the side like this so this three volts and these three volts is still the same line and then we got ground so it's always a good practice just to keep a couple of passes in this format you can see i did it for the cp2 104 as well it just makes it neater and easier to read what is important is when you do the pcb design make sure that these coupling capacitors are close to this ic so decoupling capacitors always needs to be placed on the pcb as close as possible to the rc so as you know this three volts is the same as this three volts this ground is the same as this ground so when you place these components on your pcb the pcb will not know i want to connect to this three volts it will be happy to connect it to this three volts so keep that in mind when you're placing components on the pcb have a look at your schematic and see okay these two capacitors needs to be close to u1 and then place it close to u1 don't go place it go go place it close to you two decoupling passes always always always as close as possible to the rc that you're trying to decouple the third thing i want to chat about is the layout of your components the placement try to place your components in logical order so what i mean by that is if i have my esp32 here try to keep all the components that is related to the esp32 with it same with my cp2 104 for example my usb where is that going it's going to my cpu to 104 so i'll rather have it close here because there you can see my d minus t plus d minus t plus my ask with c lines are pull ups which you can place anywhere technically i prefer to have it close to where it's supposed to be as you can see it's scl sda and here as well same with this this is my programming transistors rts this is also part of my cp2 104 so have it close here this way when someone reviews it they can easily see what is related to us with that this ic what is related with this ic ideally also put some text with it so for example like this so like this when i give this to someone to review you will straighten know straight away what this is all the stuff in this box is related to it cpt 104 all the box in this guys remember you have been designing this design for days and days and days and you are asking someone to review it that doesn't really know the background like you do so try to make it as simple as possible by putting it neatly on the schematic with as much text as you can to explain it and you can even do more than this so you can write text here by placing a text and you can say cp2 104 is usb to serial converter maybe with a link to a mouse data sheet like that so and then your guy reviewing it will closely easily know where to go to have a look closely did i connect all these points correctly so my next tip is place your components nicely neatly on the schematic to make it easier for anyone who wants to review it the fourth tip is make use of hierarchy sheets so this button here you can say create a rocky sheet so this is going to be what we did with our all-in-one clock the reason for this is this creates a sheet in a sheet type of thing so if i double click on this you can see my esp32 circuits in there it makes it much neater and easier to review as well because imagine having all these circuits on one page it will not be nice i have made a video exactly how you guys can make this yourself i'll put a link below as part of our kick out tutorials and you can make each schematic its own sheet and then connect the sheets to each other three volts three volts ground stuff like that it makes it much easier to look at so if i only want to focus on the esp32 i double click on it in my circuits here so my fourth tip is make use of hierarchy sheets link below if you want to learn more how to do this i've made a detailed video about it but yeah i think this is very important as well my fifth and last tip is use the tools in kicad to help you before you ask someone to review so in key cad you've got this inspect electrical rules checker this will actually check your schematic if things don't seem right and will let you know um so if i click on this you can see there's some errors we'll check i'll give more details in a new video about this and then you can say run straight away it tells me i've got a cue question mark so something's not annotated so i have a look okay it's here sargo tools annotate schematic annotate and i've got q2 so now go again inspect and i say run there you can see i've got account 53 warnings so no real errors but what i would do is i would just go through it one by one so click on it and you can see okay it's complaining about no connection there so you can see i don't have a connection there but i don't want the connection there so it's fine but this will just help you go through one by one by one to make sure everything makes sense it just double checks it so sometimes when you have output to output or input to input it will let you know so it's saying this not connected if this is irritating you these stuff you can actually go place no connection flag and put it at all the parts that's not connected that you're pretty sure you don't want to connect so shift q is to do this so you can play around until you get no errors or warnings whatsoever so this has become less now so warnings okay errors is quite bad but yes so do this go through it one by one and make sure you're happy with what everything is because maybe you'll see that i 33 is going to r32 or something like that uh you can delete it once you're done so that's it guys use this inspect tool before you send it to someone to review because it'll already help you to see something that you might have missed so to file is use inspect tool of kitkat so that's it guys that those are my five tips to make it easier readable for another people to review work i hope you enjoyed it like i said if you did it was helpful please let me know in the comments please let me know what other tutorials and tutorials you would like and if what other tips you would have for someone else um that's what the channel's about just helping you guys if you guys want me to review your schematics please just join our discord below and send me a message in the group we've got a pcb design channel and just send it there so it's more than me just looking at it so it's easier to spot mistakes because yeah we're all busy with work and studies and stuff so yeah many hours helps i guess um yeah so guys if you want down below you can join the plumper channel as well and you can use the remotes and stuff in our chat and just support this channel that's it for today um i'll catch you guys for the next tutorial either kiki or ltm i'll alternate day by day or week by week not day by day i still have a full-time job i can't do this every day um guys a fantastic day till next time bye

Channel: PlumPot

Views: 1,820

Keywords: pcb design, printed circuit board, kicad tutorial for beginners, kicad software tutorial

Id: S24RvYZWYUQ

Length: 11min 18sec (678 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021