WIP, not finished

Hello again, its been a while since ive stared at this grey screen to type about random thing im interested in currently! on tonight’s post, we (i) will be talking about PCB design, what am i doing to learn it, what did i make so far, and what will i (hopefully) make in the future :D

In this post ill quickly share the PCBs ive already designed, and talk about what i did/think i did wrong or right for you to point and laugh, but perhaps learn, after that ill talk about the keypad and how it functions because im really proud of it :)

I will also share resources i found useful at the end of the post (meaning whenever i finish writing it lol), i can’t share pictures of the actual PCBs after manifacturing because.. i haven’t made any of them, costs are too high around here for me to be able to, but i plan to start working and use that money for this purpose

I will also try add an explination for everything at the very end, so you can follow even if you don’t know much about PCB design :)

Why am i learning it

Put simply, im an electronics engineering student, and thought it might be a useful skill to have in my field, so why not? resources are (as always) available online and for free, so the only thing i need to spend is some amount of time and a good amount of effort, which im willing to do

Starting small.. too small

[PICTURE OF SCHEMATIC AND PCB LAYOUT]

This is my first PCB, as you can not see, its supposed to be a USB-C powered LED, the biggest issue with it is im using whats called a “receptacle”, which in more human terms means its a female port, not a male one, meaning id need a cable to turn the stupid LED on.. i really did start knowing nothing ha

Other smaller problems include using very thin traces for 5v and GND, and connecting the THT wholes of the female port to ground by a trace even tho i should just fill the plane with GND instead and let THAT do the job

Getting more confident

[PICTURE OF SCHEMATIC AND PCB LAYOUT]

Still on the theme of LEDs for some reason and after a huge amount of youtube tutorials, i made this, which as you can tell (by reading the title on the top left of the box), is an LED controller…… using a potentiometer, should’ve been more descriptive on the title

Anywho, its board that aims to turn on more LEDs the more you turn on the potentiometer, im still not good enough at this to critic my own half decent designs, but i definitely think using very varying values of resistors wasn’t a good idea as it increases manifacturing costs, because these things are too cheap not to sell in bluks of 100s and above. also i should’ve spaced the stitching vias better, and im still using thin traces

Another project of a similar level

[PICTURE OF SCHEMATIC AND PCB LAYOUT]

Another LED project, im sure you’re very excited to read about this one! haha.. anyway, in this board, instead of controlling how many LEDs are ON at one time, im controlling how intense a single LED is lighting up using PMW, which this video/post ADD LINK LATER explains better than i ever could

A dev board

[PICTURE OF SCHEMATIC AND PCB LAYOUT]

Leaving LEDs behind, i decided to try my hands on making something i already use quite often, an ESP32 dev board! except right now thats way above my level, so instead i lowered the difficulty (a LOT) and made a dev board for the ATtiny-85, which as the name suggets has a whopping 8 pins, 2 of which are power, making it only necessary to route 6 pins in total, and as per tradition an LED must exist on dev boards, making the total number of useful pins 5

My beloved child

We’ve finally reached the whole point of making this post, the KEYPAD