+ work in progress -
Introduction:
When I was browsing the university’s Bison portal for this semester’s offers, the PCB Art course caught my attention immediately, as I am passionate about electronics. To acquire the skill of making circuits on signature boards has been on my to-do list forever. Despite or precisely because I was actually supposed to be working on my final thesis this semester, the decision to take this course too was inevitable, especially since the software of choice in this course was KiCAD. The course title already gave it away, but at this point I did not know of the fascinating universe of PCB art and its huge community; not to mention the technical skills of making PCBs.
Hello World!
Within tech culture, learning new skills usually starts with a so-called "hello world!" example. By accident there has been a sketch of a unicorn on my desktop when we started working on our very first PCB. So that unicorn happened to be the artwork template. It turned out to be a sophisticated application that was ideal for finding out how to create edge cuts, screen printing and mask layers in KiCAD. The initial circuit diagram was a luminous LED.
I can hardly imagine a better „hello world of PCB design/art“.
