How To Make Your Own Printed Circuit Boards (PCB)

This video shows you how to make your own printed circuit board from schematic design, to board layout, to ordering from a manufacturer. At JLCPCB you pay $2 for 10 PCBs & discounted shipping on first order: jlcpcb.com

In this video I use the open source deisgn of the Arduino nano to design my own printed circuit board. I'm using KiCad as my design software, but these principles apply to any EDA software. I start be creating a schematic. I place the main components and connectors. Then I place the supporting components like capacitors, resistors, etc. and connect everything together using nets.

Once the schematic is complete I open the layout editor and place the footprints for each component. As you'll see in the video it's really important to spend enough time getting the layout right. Placing components in the right place and orientation will save you a huge amount of work in the long run and will lead to a better PCB. Once component placement is done, all the pins are connected together using copper traces. This is my favorite part because it's like a big puzzle.

Once the layout is finished you can generate gerber files and send them off to a board manufacturer. Making your own PCB is as simple as it's ever been.


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