PCB Creation for Beginners - Start to finish tutorial in 10 minutes

today on the hookup i'm going to show you how to take your hacked together diy projects or maybe other people's projects and make them look super professional by building custom pcbs i'm going to walk you through all the steps and everything you need to know to make your first pcb you don't need to be an electrical engineer and the process is actually easier than you think look it doesn't matter how simple a project is if it looks like this some people are always going to say that it's too complicated or that it's a fire hazard or maybe even both in almost all of my diy project videos i get people commenting that i should just make them and sell them myself but there are three big problems with that number one i don't want to have to deal with returns and warranty claims number two if i was fairly compensating myself for my time investment they wouldn't be a sweet diy deal anymore and number three most of my projects don't exactly look professional and even though they're perfectly safe and reliable they definitely look diy but pcbs are the answer to that printed circuit boards or pcbs are not complicated they're just a non-conductive material with either holes or pads for mounting your electrical components and then small embedded connections called traces that connect the components together like wires so basically this is the exact same as this but it's a lot nicer looking just to get everyone on the same page let's talk about the three basic parts of a printed circuit board first there are two ways to attach a component to a circuit board there's surface mount where you have these little copper pads on the board and you lay your components on top and then there's through hole where you stick the ends of the components through the board and then solder them from the bottom if you're new to pcbs and new to soldering then through-hole is definitely the way to go but the components tend to be bigger so your design won't be as compact speaking of soldering on your pcbs you don't want your solder to go everywhere you only want it to go around your components so to do that the rest of the board including the traces is covered in a thin lacquer called a solder mask that prevents the solder from sticking to it leaving the solder only where you want it as for the traces most pcbs are double layer meaning the tiny copper lines that act like wires between the components can be on top or on the bottom when you have a lot of traces to route around the board a double layer pcb makes it easier since the traces can't cross over each other the traces can also go through from the top of the board to the bottom and anytime you see a small hole without a component in it that's probably a via which is how the traces get from one side to the other traces are just like wires where if you're sending a lot of amperage through one trace it's going to need to be thicker than a trace that's just carrying data so some traces are going to be wider than others and therefore use more copper additionally it's common for pcbs to have an entire ground plane which means that anything that isn't a trace is actually connected to a big copper pad that leads to ground ground planes are good because they reduce electrical noise and they help with heat dissipation but they aren't completely necessary i'm going to show you how to make one in this video but it's probably overkill for our board design so now that we've got the basics down let's take a look at a few pcbs to see what i'm going to show you how to make today this board is an led controller called a dige quad made by the youtuber quindor you can see that the bottom side of the board is composed of through-hole components as well as surface mount components not only that but quindor has designed all kinds of circuits to do voltage regulation logic shifting power smoothing and all kinds of crazy stuff even though this may be your ultimate goal that is definitely not what we're going to do today today all we're going to do is take pre-made circuits and connect them together using pcbs instead of wires turning something like this into this the software that we're going to use is easy eda which is a free online pcb designing service with thousands of parts in its database to make the process of pcb creation easy step one is to log into easy eda and i'm going to use my google account to do that after that go ahead and make a new project i'm going to be making a pcb for my blinds project and specifically i'm going to draw inspiration from a few pcbs that my subscribers have already made and i'm going to make a sender board with three ethernet jacks and then three receiver boards that go to each blind after you choose a name for your project easy eda will automatically open up schematic mode as i said before easy eda has a bunch of pre-made parts so i'm just going to start by using the search function for the sender board i'll need the esp8266 nodemcu a buck converter a screw terminal and a few ethernet jacks i've had pretty good luck just searching for the part number that's listed on the amazon page and sometimes when searching you'll find an official part from the easy eda or lcsc databases but most of the time you're going to be using user contributed parts which i've found to be pretty reliable since i'm just using common components and pre-made circuits i just ordered them off of amazon but you could also order from a proper electrical components company like lcse if you're making a large order or you just can't find the right part for the right price on amazon once you've got all your parts on your schematic you need to go ahead and make your connections it's not super important to make your connections look nice here but it does make it easier to keep track of them don't worry about overlapping your connections on this page because this isn't how the traces of your pcb will actually look once you've made all your connections use the labels for vcc ground 5 volts and any other connections that you want to label in your project next click on the design menu and then convert to pcb it'll probably tell you that some of your nets are not connected and that's to be expected nets are the term used for the connections between the pins on your pcb and in our case we only used a small fraction of the pins available on the node nodemcu so the rest of the nets for those are open if you labeled all of your connection you should be able to easily see that all of the unfinished nets aren't part of the connections that you'll need so go ahead and click no keep going to get to the pcb page in this page you can just keep the default settings and then position your components how you want them on your final pcb for me i want the ethernet jacks on the back of the board and the node mcu butt converter and terminal block on the front to do this select each component and change the layer drop down to your desired location there are a bunch of layers to choose from but the important ones for placing parts are your top layer and bottom layer which are the copper layers located on the top and bottom respectively at this point i also like to put labels on my board you can not only add new text to your board but you can edit the text that you imported with your parts and you can change or remove the component labels that were automatically generated these labels should be part of either the top silk screen or the bottom silk screen since we want them labeled with ink and not with copper i'm going to put some general instructions on my board label the positive and negative terminals for my 12-volt connector and assign each ethernet port to a window and then last it's time for routing which is figuring out a way to get all of your traces connected without overlapping each other for complex boards with a bunch of small parts routing is an art form and for some things like antennas the length shape and location of the traces has a huge effect on performance but for our board we can just use the auto router go up to the route menu and select auto route if your board isn't going to carry a lot of power you can just leave the default settings and hit run but since we're going to be carrying a decent amount of current on our 12 volt vcc line i want to make sure that those traces are extra thick to do that i'll create a design rule for the specific nets that are carrying power by hitting the design rule button creating a new routing rule for a thicker trace and then assigning that rule to my five volt vcc and ground nets after the rules are set hit run and the auto router should do its thing sometimes it goes a little crazy and creates some squiggly lines and if that happens you can remove any unnecessary turns by double clicking on the white anchor points on that turn if you wanted to create a ground plane instead of the thick traces you'd select the copper area tool tell it that you want that copper plane to apply to the ground net only and then draw your area wherever you want again for this project i'm just going to use traces for my grounds since a ground plane is a little bit unnecessary after routing give your board one last look over i like to look at each layer individually by clicking on the eyeball in the layers menu and then i zoom in really close to make sure all the parts are aligned and all the traces are connected where i want them then hit save next to actually get them printed you're going to need to generate what's called a gerber file which is actually a collection of files used to tell your pcb manufacturer how to make your boards so click on fabrication and then pcb fabrication file it's going to recommend that you check your project for design rule violations which is probably a good idea so go ahead and do that in the next menu click generate gerber to download a zip file containing all the instructions for your pcb this zip file can be used with any pcb manufacturer so i'm going to use pcb way since i've always had really great service from them they support my channel and their prices are competitive at the pcbway website enter the length and width of your pcb into the instant quote window and then on the next page you can select your shipping method and change any other settings you want like maybe the color of your board then go ahead and hit add to cart on the next page you'll upload your gerber file and then one of the pcb ways employees will review your order to make sure that there are no serious design errors before sending it into production before you check out look down in the description of this video i usually have a promo code to get at least a few dollars off your first order at pcboa.com pcbway makes your pcbs really quickly but how fast you get them in your hands depends mostly on the shipping method that you use when your pcb order arrives it's time to get soldering and since this is all through-hull stuff it's a great way to practice your skills if you're a novice the key to soldering through-hole components is to not try to touch the solder to the iron instead try to press the iron against the pin and the hole on the pcb and then touch the solder to that if you screw up and get a big bead of solder you can always go back and hit it again with the iron and thanks to the solder mask your blob should turn into a nice tent like this another thing you can decide at this stage is whether you want your parts to permanently be attached or if you want to use female header pins to be able to remove and switch out parts as needed header pins are an extra cost but they're well worth it in my opinion if you can spare the extra height on your board alright so here it is this is the hello world of pcb making and a gateway drug into more complex circuits and professional looking projects this pcb was actually made by a subscriber and posted on the hook up home automation facebook page if you've made one of my projects into a pcb i'd love if you could come share it with the group i've got links down in the description to a few products made by my subscribers and the gerber files for the pcbs from this video i'm definitely not an expert at this yet so if i missed something important make sure to leave me a comment and let me know thank you so much to my awesome patrons over at patreon for your continued support on my channel and if you're interested in supporting my channel please check out the links down in the description if you enjoyed this video please consider subscribing and as always thanks for watching the hookup

Channel: The Hook Up

Views: 21,855

Keywords: home assistant, hassio, home automation, hass.io, smart home, diy, electronics, arduino, esp8266, nodemcu, wemos d1, automation, how to amke pcbs, how to amke pcbs at home, how to make pcbs at home, easyeda, Easyeda.com

Id: MsdJgEinb34

Length: 10min 40sec (640 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 28 2021