Well, let’s learn it together! I’ve posted four Wednesday nights in the VHS event calendar, from July 29 to Aug 19, when I’ll open the space for anyone interested in getting together and trying to level up their KiCad skills.
This won’t be instructor led or particularly structured, the goal is simply to have people around to compare notes with.
In Slack there were some interesting suggestions like having a common board design people could work on. If someone wants to find something suitable or put something together, that’d be awesome. I’m committing to opening the space during those hours for the people who want to play with KiCad, anything beyond that is up to the participants.
I think the focus of the workgroup should be more about the actual CAD to Fabrication process rather than the circuit design. It would be best if could have an electrical design prepared before the sessions so we can spend more time learning how to lay it out on a pcb.
That said, if we want to work on a common board design then please suggest some ideas for a neat circuit to layout.
On slack we talked about doing some simple 555 timer circuits. Either a blinky circuit or creating adjustable frequency to send to a buzzer/speaker/siren. These would probably be good low level circuits to start learning the software with.
We could also look into doing something like a 12V to 5V/3.3V power converter or a waveform generator.
I’m hoping at some point during these sessions we can get a design fabricated through DirtyPCB or OSHPARK and everyone can take a board home.
As I said, I’m opening the space for KiCad learners. If you want to put together a suggested circuit or lesson plan or anything else, you’re full welcome to do so. I’m sure it’ll be appreciated. Personally I’ll probably be muddling through my own design ideas, but I’d love to see what anyone else gets up to.
This sounds great. I’ve been learning KiCad on my own for the last few weeks. I just got my first PCB back from OSH Park and am happy with the results! I would like to start working on more elaborate designs so I’ll try to make it out to as many Wednesday nights as I can. I can probably help those who are complete beginners, and hopefully learn something from those who are more advanced.
I’ll be there on Wed night. I know zero about KiCad but will kick it around
a bit and see what others are working on. I also just got some boards made
at OSH Park like @lukecyca (think they were in the same run). The quality
is excellent. Will bring them with me.
I have a small board (all through hole) that I want to make and do a run of at least 30 of…
Unfortunately I have to work this Wednesday but i will try to make the others…
Just to be clear on this point… I’m hosting KiCad nights starting next Wednesday, the 29th.
If someone wants to host a night this week it would be great! But I’m not available to host nights just yet, unfortunately.
I have no experience with KiCad yet, but I do have a project; I want to modify the Atreus Keyboard PCB design (KiCad design files are available here), specifically, I want to split the PCB into two, and make holes for headers, so I can make a split Atreus keyboard.
Any suggestions on how I should get prepared in advance would be appreciated. I’ll follow along with whatever lesson plan/project you guys choose. Just want to share my motivation ahead of time.
-Jev
Should be straight forward since you already have the KiCad schematic, just bring your laptop with KiCad installed and the design files downloaded and make sure you can open them in KiCad
I’ll specifically be going over using the latest nightlies as they’re significantly different in numerous areas to the old stable, but you more or less will be able to follow along even with the ancient version - just you’ll be missing out on all the features that set it apart from Eagle and give you reason to put up with its issues.
It should be noted that the OS X version is by far in the worst shape right now, with the Windows version also having a number of issues. There were a few spots that I was having to jump between the two platforms to work around specific crashes in each. The Linux build is usually the most stable. In short: virtual machines for each platform may be useful.
A quick note to everyone attending the workshop. Don’t wait until you get to VHS to download/install KiCad - it’s a big download and our connection isn’t that fast! It’ll be a much more productive night if everyone at least has it downloaded, if not already installed. This especially goes for any Linux users - the dependencies can be brutal (as in all the way to needing to upgrade gcc and the kernel I hear in some cases) if you’re compiling from source, so I’d recommend going for a pre-build binary if it’s available for your distro.
Also, just to repeat it, it’s by far the best choice to go with the very latest nightly builds for your platform, NOT the “old stable”, as that’s around 2 years old and is missing pretty much every single interesting feature that makes KiCad worthwhile (not a joke).
We had 10 or 12 people for our first KiCad workgroup last night, which was great! Thank you to the VHS members who weren’t taking part in the workgroup for leaving us the main table area, we needed all of it by the time we got going.
My original plan was just to work like a study group, where we all tried to do what we could with the software using the documentation and online resources, and we’d share tips and answer each other’s questions as we figured things out. (Aka: I don’t know the software well enough to teach it.) On the other hand, @rsim knows KiCad inside and out, and saved the day by giving us a nice walkthrough of KiCad tools and workflow! Thank you Richard!
Roughly summarized, key points of the workflow include:
create your schematic in the Eeschema editor
generate a netlist from your schematic (in Eeschema)
run the CvPcb tool to add part footprints to the netlist
pull the completed netlist into the Pcbnew PCB layout editor
arrange and wire the components and add a board outline
generate gerber files and a drill file
zip up the gerbers and drill files and submit them to a board house
wait by the mailbox for your boards to arrive!
I think most of us had some experience of the rough condition of KiCad’s nightly builds, with different features working or not for different people and some occasional crashes. I was really hoping the new KiCad stable release would be out by now but it’s still going to take a while, unfortunately. KiCad is more exciting for its potential than its current state.
Despite the raw software some or all of us are going to give it another go next Wednesday and see what trouble we can get up to. Come and join us!
Super useful KiCad Tutorials for anyone who wants more instruction on how to use the software. It’s based on the stable Legacy version but the workflow should be the same.
