I mean like awareness that, just under the surface, there are deep explorations waiting for the right time and place to emerge; things you’ve set aside or placed on the back burner but will tackle eventually/many you already have tackled.
Are you deeply self aware of these interests like some kind of list? If so, are these interests deeply connected in your mind to your past explorations and interests like some kind of road map or branching tree structure of thought?
Maybe circuit board design.
I’ve hand etched a few basic boards in the past, but I’d like to do a few “properly” using some CAD tool and have them professionally fabbed.
So far each time I’ve tried, I have failed to wrap my brain around the CAD workflow and after a few weeks I give up in frustration and move on to something different.
You have to start smaller, and specifically, you need to plan on a minimum of fully redesigning the entire board twice, three times if you want to get it to a really good state.
You’re largely guessing what will be the optimum configuration for routing. After the first work through, it will be obvious here major circuit blocks need to be routed to make the design work at all or, at least, make sense. The second time through things will fall in place much more quickly as you’ll know where the major problems are and start by routing them. At this point, with a little experience and thought you’ll probably see the last major issues related to things like ground loops and likely electrical noise issues that can be solved if you completely redo the design.
If you start out like this, you’ll likely start thinking about your designs inside isolated little circuit blocks, like the power, analogue, digital, communications, sensors, etc. Then you can start simply redesigning these little blocks as needed while you also start saving these blocks in KiCAD and dropping them into future designs with minimal changes.
Once upon a time, I saw someone say “design is done in blocks” and I tried to start out like this, but that was ineffective for me. I needed to learn how everything fit together first and that made the blocks design methodology click.
Just as a few tips, make your traces as large as you can/defaults are way too small, make your through hole pads much larger so you can desolder stuff several times without lifting a pad, and route a ground trace through absolutely everywhere possible and connect it to as solid an infill plane as possible, use 0R connections to save yourself from mistakes in routing and add an easy location for pull up resistors. Finally, print absolutely ever design on paper with the back side inverted, and glue this to a piece of card stock like cardboard. It can be from any food packaging like a cereal box. Then use a drill or awl to make all of your holes, place your components, and check the fitments inside your project enclosure, this alone will save you MANY mistakes.
GL
Thank you. I’ll keep that advice in mind when I get brave enough to try again.
Idk what tools you’ve tried but there are some that are pretty easy to use. I personally enjoy LibrePCB, but I think Fritzing might be easier and it even has a protoboard thing that’s really cool.
One thing I’d suggest, is learning how to do the schematics stuff first (if you don’t yet,) I feel like this is what helps the most in understanding these tools. I don’t have an electronics background, so this was holding me back at the beginning, now I find them super intuitive.
As a side note, be careful with those acids - aside of being dangerous to handle, disposing them improperly is super destructive to the environment.
The schematics are no problem for me, I’ve been drawing those by hand since the '80s.
It’s the steps between that and generating the Gerbers that mess up my mind.