My 12 Favorite tips for Designing in KiCAD

Hi I am Colin. I’m a 3rd year Electrical Engineering Student. I’ve used KiCAD for close to 3 years now, and this video will cover my 10 favorite KiCAD tips.

In case you’re unaware, kicad is an open source software for electrical and pcb design. I’ve personally used it for a dozen or so projects where it's been a better option compared to wiring a breadboard.

Place Footprints Plugin
The ‘Place Footprints Plugin’ isn’t something most people need, but when you need it, you need it. I had to place 840 leds in 24 sets of matrices. Place footprints allowed me to make the matrices using the LEDs that were already in the editor. This works much better than KiCAD’s built in Array Creation tool. Additionally, it allows you to make circular arrays.
(Rules checkers are my) DRC/ERC are my closest friends, not my enemies.
The Design and Electrical Rules Checkers looks for the most common mistakes you could make when designing a schematic or PCB. I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t always use the Rules Checker before buying my PCBs, but every time I do use it, I find something I would’ve missed.
Properties panel
Picture this, you’ve just placed dozens of footprints, but you forgot to change a property like exclude from bill of materials. By opening the properties panel, you can simply highlight the footprints and change the value there.
Remove silkscreen that isn’t above soldermask
While this is usually turned on by default, it's important to note that you don’t need to worry about overlapping silkscreen on copper for simple graphics. For instance, this puzzle I recently ordered has a complex wave pattern overlaid across the entire PCB, and kicad removed it where there was copper showing.
Distribute, left, and right alignments
Quite literally the most underrated simple feature, I use it all the time to align footprints and make my PCBs look as professional as I’m capable.
Change rotation degrees in settings
KiCAD normally allows rotation at 90 degree intervals when you press ‘r’. However, you can change how many degrees you rotate by going to the settings under ‘editing options’.
TransformIt
This is a plugin that allows you to batch scale footprints. This has been the most useful plugin for me many many times because kicad doesn’t natively support scaling graphics after they’ve been imported.
Image Converter
KiCAD has a built-in image to bitmap converter. This was very convenient for adding graphics to my puzzle PCB.
R_Small, C_Small, LED_Small
This is a small improvement, but using the symbols that have ‘_small’ added after their name will use compact symbols that make your schematic diagram much easier to read.
You can convert shapes to other objects like zones, rule areas, lines, and outsets.
This means you can important SVGs and then use them as the zone fills or edge cuts.
Watch Zachariah Peterson’s Videos
Zachariah Peterson is my favorite PCB education tool. His videos breaking down PCB mistakes can be really informative, and honestly, entertaining.
Have friends that also design PCBs to reflect with
Knowing people that can review your PCB before you order it will help a lot. It's easy to get tunnel vision on projects that have immense scope creep. You really don’t want to make a mistake on a large project that costs hundreds or thousands of dollars and weeks to ship.

#kicad #electronics #advice #tips #science #engineering #electrical #electricalengineering #pcb #pcbdesign #jlcpcb #pcbway #altium

Видео My 12 Favorite tips for Designing in KiCAD канала Electronics Guy