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Teach Me PCB
- lbayes 5y agoI've been really surprised at how simple it can be to configure complex ICs with basic pull up / pull down resistors and voltage dividers. The (older) books I was reading got me really nervous about needing to design all kinds of complicated circuits, but most things these days are just finding an available IC and configuring it. Well... It's not so trivial to find an "available" IC this year, but hopefully this too shall pass.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI was doing this in the 1980s (started as an EE), but those boards were crazy simple, compared to what we have, these days.
- eljimmy 5y agoHas anyone taken this course (or a similar one provided by Mark and Jess) before? I'm interested to hear your thoughts on it.
- mjhughes 5y agoThis is Jesse's first year teaching. He was the stand-out star of the last round -- so much so that I promoted him to instructor mid-course.
- baybal2 5y agoDoing PCBs for 12th year now without a complete engineering education. Just as the lack of formal CS background imprints on your lifelong experience with computer languages, the same way is the lack of EE background. From time to time, a recent grad hire comes by, and fixes my work, and shows me where I screwed up with a few calculations on a pocket calculator.
- cinntaile 5y agoIt's likely that it's very specific knowledge that you lack no? If you wantee to address that it should be possible with self-study?
- crispyambulance 5y agoIt is theoretically possible with self-study, but the problem is it's still very easy to make practical mistakes even if you "understand" all the theory. Eventually you run into a problem and have to re-spin the board with no margin of extra time (assuming this is for work). In that scenario, having access to an experienced expert is immensely helpful.
- baybal2 5y agoI pretty much continue self-study every time I stand corrected. Things learned from junior hires: a lot in RF domain, opamps, 74XXX trickery, signal integrity measurements, fiddling with high freq PCIE, DDR, PAM4 lanes in the sciency way, and whole new world of advanced power electronics, and designing it according to standards, and codes...
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoIts very hard to replicate 4+ years of "required" study because you don't know what you don't know
- cinntaile 5y agoIt's not like EE curricula are a well guarded secret though, not in todays day and age at least. So that shouldn't be impossible to figure out.
- gorjusborg 5y agoOn the other hand, not knowing something that doesn't matter to your design shouldn't stop it from getting done.
- fxtentacle 5y agoSame here. I have no formal education but I recently finished my first 12 layer USB3.1 SuperSpeed + FPGA board. Every once in a while, I have to book a freelancer to explain niche knowledge to me - for example how to calculate the impedance for the USB3 specs - but thanks to good software, it was a lot easier to learn than I thought. By now, I have my own tiny KiCad fork to make things easier to read and look like I expect it to. https://gitlab.com/fxtentacle/kicad/-/commits/vector_font https://gitlab.com/fxtentacle/kicad/-/commits/vector_font
- gmurphy 5y agoAny tips on how to find/book those freelancers? I've been looking for similar help
- fxtentacle 5y agoI asked a lecturer at our local university to introduce me to some of his PhD students. That said, many hobbyists also just ask on the KiCad forums. And I know there are PCB review tasks on upwork.com
- le-mark 5y agoThis sounds exactly like a pcb project I have in mind, plus a bunch of ddr3. How hard is it starting from almost zero? I imagine diy isn’t realistic, how much does design of such a board cost?
- tremon 5y agoWe didn't even cover PCB design in my EE years, the course load was pretty much evenly split between circuit theory, VLSI (processor) design, power distribution systems, and embedded systems programming. Plus the necessary theoretical background in physics, mathematics, control theory, and management.
- ducktective 5y agoHow to preview? Is it free? What EDA software is used?
- espadrine 5y agoLast year’s course indicates this: > You will need to choose a software tool to complete the activities in this course. Altium Designer, Circuitmaker, Autodesk Eagle, KiCad, and Diptrace will be shown as examples in this course.
- ducktective 5y agoThanks. I couldn't find any info about last year's course. Is it open to preview?
- mjhughes 5y agoJust opened up the course overview so far. Enter as guest.
- fxtentacle 5y agoKiCad is good and free. The only thing it lacks in comparison with $10k+ offerings is a convenient autorouter. But then again, I couldn't get automated routing to work in Altium either O_O'
- ravenstine 5y agoAutorouting works in EasyEDA but it still requires supervision. Settings you think would make things better like decreasing the track width can end up creating more vias rather than the other way around.
- borjah 5y agoWell, I worked with altium and kicad for almost 8 years. There are more subtle differences than the autorouter, and this is basically a trivial thing because I rarely use it. For example, kicad does not have some advanced features like via fencing, via picking, lenght matching, and some more. Is true that you could download a third party plugin, but is not the same. Variants are the same, you cannot do it in kicad and altium is a breeze. It give you the flexibility to build different versión of the board in seconds. Also, the library management is, in my opinion, very error prone. I get the flexibility and I find it useful in some cases but... And the last is the design rules UI/UX is very simplistic, and you need to know what you are doing. Which is not bad per se, but for a software oriented to mainly begginers, I think is a bad idea. Besides you cannot import/export rules from one project to another and this is a killer for me. I hope some day kicad will be a solid competitor to altium but right now I cannot fully do all my work in kicad as a electronics engineer, so even Altium is expensive, is a much needed tool. Edit: I stand corrected, kicad indeed has lenght matching.
- xor99 5y agoLooks good, I'm looking to brush up on Kicad or learn Altium to compare. Phil's Lab on youtube is a great resource for learning pcb design.
- donquichotte 5y agoPhil's lab is the first thing that came to my mind when seeing this. Phil is an excellent teacher and has great content on PCB design, digital filtering, signal processing, C programming, FreeRTOS etc. Certainly an engineer that I would LOVE to have on the team.
- joshvm 5y agoFor advanced topics, I've heard good stuff about these: https://academy.fedevel.com/courses/online-advanced-pcb-layout-course https://academy.fedevel.com/courses/online-advanced-pcb-layo... (high speed layout, BGAs, etc) Not free, but not super expensive and they also have introductory courses ($50). https://academy.fedevel.com/courses/online-want-to-design-your-own-arduino-board https://academy.fedevel.com/courses/online-want-to-design-yo...
- fxtentacle 5y agoMy recommendation would be to search YouTube for "Rick Hartley". The guy is extremely knowledgeable, yet humble, and presents things like grandpa reciting a war story. It's easy to listen to, and I'd take him being on any kind of program as an endorsement that it'll be high quality content. The most important talk for beginners getting into high-speed is probably this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySuUZEjARPY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySuUZEjARPY because without proper grounding, interference and EMI is going to destroy your HF signals (for example CPU to RAM bus).
- tylermenezes 5y agoHe's actually done some great videos in collaboration with the parent comment's recommendation, which you can find for free on their YouTube channel.
- dotancohen 5y agoHe seems very well grounded in the field.
- 5y ago
- gmurphy 5y agoI held off doing PCB stuff for a long time because the tools seemed incredibly complex and intimidating, and now I wonder how I ever did anything without it. The things I wish someone had told me: - all a PCB is, is a flat version of your hand-wired prototype - all those crazy lines are just the wires - there's no special hidden EE magic until later - the schematic editor shows your intent - the pcb layout editor shows where things go - the hard part is actually just finding schematic and layout editor files for the components you're using - github search is great for this - you will make lots of mistakes and need a few goes - everyone does, debugging is half the fun, don't be afraid - online PCB houses make those mistakes cheap Things I have made with little more than introductory-Arduino knowledge: - A wearable bluetooth ring: https://twitter.com/gmurphy/status/1372368637332389888 https://twitter.com/gmurphy/status/1372368637332389888 - A hall-effect volume control knob for my PC: https://twitter.com/gmurphy/status/1179831446204121088 https://twitter.com/gmurphy/status/1179831446204121088 - A long range garage door opener: https://www.instagram.com/p/B11m1y5J3qc/ https://www.instagram.com/p/B11m1y5J3qc/ - And currently working on a keyboard: https://twitter.com/gmurphy/status/1443048243101777921 https://twitter.com/gmurphy/status/1443048243101777921 Also, the debugging step for me got orders of magnitude easier when I got a set of PCBite probes - just drop them on and they mostly stay in place. e.g: https://mobile.twitter.com/gmurphy/status/1365753286544957442 https://mobile.twitter.com/gmurphy/status/136575328654495744...
- znpy 5y agoThank you for sharing tour experience with the topic, i was wondering: where whould somebody start if all they know is basic circuit theory?
- dbrgn 5y agoJust start a small project and figure out how things work on-the-go :) My first one was a small PCB to control a RGB LED strip using three potentiometers.
- dogma1138 5y agoUnless you dealing with things where signal integrity matters any drawing program with fixed dimensions that you can reliably print from whilst maintaining dimensional accuracy if you are using the print and transfer method works well. CAD software for PCBs becomes a must when you need to deal with a lot of components in odd sizes/package formats, you need auto routing, being able to simulate resistance, impedance or clearance for high voltage sections of your PCB or when you actually need to get your PCB manufactured by a 3rd party that has specific requirements for file formats etc. And even then some of these 3rd parties allow upload of graphical formats for the trace and solder mask layers.
- kop316 5y agoDigikey actually makes really nice YouTube tutorials on how to use KiCAD: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vaCVh2SAZY4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vaCVh2SAZY4 When I had to design a board I used that.
- WaitWaitWha 5y agoIs there a public syllabus for this course, prior to creating an account?
- mjhughes 5y agoI just opened guest access to it.
- WaitWaitWha 5y agothanks!
- mjhughes 5y agoI opened guest access to the syllabus / course overview.
- mjhughes 5y agoI opened up guest access to the syllabus & overview so you can see what's there. -- Mark
- hyperman1 5y agoThanks
- auxym 5y agoHi, looks super interesting, I'm signing up! Is there any chance you would consider offering some sort of "course completion certificate" with number of hours? I'd be interested in getting these hours credited as Continuing Professional Development for my P.Eng. board. I'd of course be willing to pay a fee for this (which I could get reimbursed by my employer).
- mjhughes 5y agoSorry -- in the air most of yesterday. Sure -- I can offer a certificate. Do you need a hard copy? Digital? We can figure it out.
- nimos 5y agoIf someone wanted to do this but didn't know how to make schematics is there any recommended intro material?
- malwrar 5y agoI've been getting into this over most of quarantine and have successfully imitated this guy's tutorials (just had to swap out the microcontroller): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7-8nUU6e3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7-8nUU6e3E If you don't know EE basics you'll probably want to grok those first, there's plenty of youtube channels covering it. Good starter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc979OhitAg&list=PLWv9VM947MKi_7yJ0_FCfzTBXpQU-Qd3K https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mc979OhitAg&list=PLWv9VM947M...
- nimos 5y agoThanks!