Design a circuit board from the ground up!

Hi Folks and Welcome! (Please read it all, I know I know)

October 11th, 10am to 7-ish - mark your calendar - we are running a full day workshop on designing production-quality, professional-level circuit boards for the newcomer, entrepreneur, maker, hacker, what-not! (there will be another scheduled for the 18th but future sections are TBD) This is not a course in electronics theory or ohms law, nodes and meshes, matrices, etc; though we’ll cover any relevant theoretical basics where it pertains to the design of quality circuits and we’ll take a look at the circuits we’re using for the exercises...LDOs, switchers, some MCU stuff, sensors, yadda.

Still, do not feel like you need any high level math or engineering background to be successful here. This’ll be mostly back of the envelope. If you can bring it up on a dev board, you’re at the right level to join. If you know more, awesome. We’ll cover some of the pitfalls even solid hackers make leaping into professional-caliber designs and also the things organizations get wrong designing circuits as a part of a team.

This is a hands-on workshop on making the leap from that ratsnest of wires you have hanging off of an Arduino, that piece of perfboard, or something you etched at home, into something that can be built in a board house to a professional standard. Our time will be spent in a CAD tool creating circuits.

We will look at component selection and making the choices about parts, creating libraries, drawing schematics, wiring, electrical rules, creating PCB footprints (to spec), routing, PCB rules & constraints, output files, what to send, where to send it etc, etc. When we’re done, we’ll be ordering some boards. If you want to order the ones you’d done in the workshop, we will arrange this at cost for you and place a bulk order for components so you can put it together.

Because this is hands-on (VIP) (and we will be designing a real board from scratch), we need you to bring your laptop ...please, please! We will have a limited number of computers but very limited...best to bring your own or you might be left wanting...and that would suck...esp if you got this far. OS doesn’t matter. As long as it can run Eagle (http://www.cadsoftusa.com/), you’re ok (free version).

Even if you are not building a “product” per se (just hacking, making, whathaveyou) you will get a sense for how boards are made and how to build real, high-quality hardware that works (assuming your electronics work :).

A great deal of emphasis is on best practices, modularity, reuse, and understanding the “insider” stuff -- board finishes, trace widths, rules such as clearances, materials, what the mfg asks and how to answer, also the circuit know-how to make sure you get things right...decoupling, pullups, pulldowns, placement, etc. The premise being that no one tells you how to leap from prototype to product and this can feel very unsettling. We’re hoping to give you the resources to understand this process and really succeed in crossing this divide.

As indicated, this is full of exercises we’ll be doing live so you’ll need to install the latest version of Eagle (sorry to the haters...it’s the only thing decent that runs on Mac, Linux and Windows and is free...we’ll take the arguments offline).

The circuit that we’re designing is loaded with a little bit of everything...MCU, power supply, sensors, comms, control, etc. It also contains mixed SMT and thru-hole parts, some notably small parts to challenge your soldering chops, and a bunch of other stuff that is key to understanding how to do it right.

Thanks for reading! Look forward to seeing you there!

Best regards,

Matt

p.s. Gentle reminder for meetup etiquette: due to the overwhelming response and very limited space, we’ve decided we will run this workshop more than once to accommodate as many people as possible. How many is still TBD so it is very much first-come / first-serve and we’d encourage you to register quickly as space is seriously limited (we will do our best to accommodate people in future sessions, I promise...but we’re also managing a group thru exercises and such and it is best for everyone to give them the attention they deserve). That said, we would really, really love it if you can’t make it, that you give as much notice as possible so someone else can attend! It’s a whole day affair so plan accordingly.