![]() Even so, I routinely spent one full week (literally) checking everything before going production. These days it’s not too costly to do 4 proto boards so even if the worst happens, it ain’t the end of the world. On the other hand, there’s a lot more to 3 and the more complex they get…the more the chance something might slip by. Rev 3 is 1000x more complex but I’m not getting to the part where I have a lot of confidence. When I did revision 2.0, it was so much more complex that I was still thinking, ‘Man, I hope I got this right’ - turns out I nailed it. Revision 1 was the real “I have no idea if this will work” experiment and it did. You’d be really shocked how complex my boards are getting but I’ve been doing it bit by bit. I had zero IC/electronics experience, am still lacking in many fundamentals, but man, I’m on a tear and it’s been a lot of fun. I’m now on my 3rd revision and had wanted to use KiCAD back on revision 2 but finally made the change for version 3 (I needed something more mainstream). I really can’t think of anything I would do differently on that one (it was way more mature and feature-packed). My second revision was also done in ExpressPCB and it’s virtually perfect. I went through the same thing two years ago and made my first board in CAD (ExpressPCB) and it worked very well. This is an orphaned repo, the news about the v5 libs. Note that the footprint libraries are the *.pretty repos themselves. The schematic and 3D libraries for KiCad 4.0. There are rules for the Courtyard layer (and all the other stuff for the Libraries and Repos), that you can read up on here: GitHub KiCad/kicad-library They are there to draw some bigger outline of devices on to (0.25 mm or somesuch, read link below), so that when you arrange them in PCBnew (with this layer switched visible - only time you need it) you place them in such a way that it is possible for a pick & place machine to do it in real, without crashing one device into another during placement (tolerances, tolerances, tolerances). Two of them are the Courtyard layers… one for back and one for front. There is Front Copper, There is Back Soldermask, there is User Drawings… etc… In PCBnew you got several of those layers, each has got a use. coordinate strings in excelĪ layer in KiCAD PCBnew is a drawing layer - you remember clear overhead projector sheets that you could stack over each other? - same thing, just digital. Personally I’ve never used one and don’t intend to, as the kicad_mod file format for footprints is human readable in a text editor and I can create QFN/etc. Usually you then need to add some more information to the footprint in the footprint editor to match it to what you want in a footprint (extra REF field or different silk screen drawing), and it’s ready to go. ![]() You just tell it what size the pads are (X x Y), the pitch, the row spacing, package dimensions, and so on… and it will generate the footprint for you. It will have options for QFN, QFP, SSOP, SOP, etc. I’ll have to look up “parametric footprint generators” and “courtyard layer”, because I don’t know what they are yet.Ī parametric footprint generator helps you generate simple pattern footprints where you got a lot of pads to position, size and set up to be of the kind you want. I’m only a beginner in this electronics thing - I knew nothing 3 mounts ago -, so it’s been quite difficult. I thought the outline would be critical so that you know if parts will hit in the PCB layout stage, so I was wondering how accurate are the footprints in the library. ![]() I just spent a month working out how to create a part from scratch in Fritzing, and was not looking forward to doing that again, but I looked up videos of how to make footprints in KiCad and it seams that they don’t really care if the silkscreen outline of the body of the part is that accurate. Is there a place for user created parts sharing. I found the official KiCad parts library, but it only seams to have the std library that I have in 4.0.1. The first part I opened in Schematic Editor was the Atmega2560(TQFP100), but when I got to the PCB editor there is no footprint. The open source project that I’m looking at is supposedly changing to KiCad and I wanted to get a head start by trying it.
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