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GMU:Printed Circuit Board Art/mxkllmnn (view source)
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As the graphics are not on the silkscreen layer, but the areas have been exposed on the soldermask layer, I found an opportunity to combine artistic and technical peculiarities because it makes these excellent GND connections for crocodile clamps while debugging. | As the graphics are not on the silkscreen layer, but the areas have been exposed on the soldermask layer, I found an opportunity to combine artistic and technical peculiarities because it makes these excellent GND connections for crocodile clamps while debugging. | ||
A milestone on the way to a PCB is a hand-soldered prototype. As common switches come with a cover, the base plate already existed. But I did not start soldering right away. The first thing I did was a rough sketch of all components and their respective connections on a piece of paper. Only then I made my first attempts at this design in KiCAD. Since I did not want to spoil my option of revisiting capacitive touch gestures at a later stage, it was my personal challenge to realise everything on just one side of a PCB with no viases or through-hole components. Of course, this also meant that all elements had to be placed so that there is no intersection of a single trace, which has been hard before I got to know the practice of ground areas (across the entire PCB). Another major restriction was the form of the cover's connection clips. | A milestone on the way to a PCB is a hand-soldered prototype. As common switches come with a cover, the base plate already existed. But I did not start soldering right away. The first thing I did was a rough sketch of all components and their respective connections on a piece of paper. Only then I made my first attempts at this design in KiCAD. Since I did not want to spoil my option of revisiting capacitive touch gestures at a later stage, it was my personal challenge to realise everything on just one side of a PCB with no viases or through-hole components. Of course, this also meant that all elements had to be placed so that there is no intersection of a single trace, which has been hard before I got to know the practice of ground areas (across the entire PCB). Another major restriction was the form of the cover's connection clips. It was an eternal back and forth between different media (Paper, Fusion, KiCAD, soldering iron, and back again) before the hand-soldered prototype was finished. | ||
[[File:circuitSketch01.png|800px]] | [[File:circuitSketch01.png|800px]] | ||