First PCB Design Review Please

[joelaguirre92]

Hi Everyone!

I am a newer to design PCB. This is my first project in Circuit Maker, and I designed this PCB layout for this PWM generator circuit. I would prettied you help me to get a comment or recommendation to this circuit.

https://365.altium.com/files/C760D36F-7C93-4933-A89F-60AA185B367E

Thank you for your time.

[Doctorandus_P]

There is not much to review here.

Your "gerber" directory has empty files except for some headers, and for the rest I only see a 3D model of the PCB + parts, but no tracks on the PCB.

How do you do a 555 project without resistors?

Your project pretty much looks like:

https://circuitmaker.com/Projects/Details/Dan-Gillham/555-PWM-Signal-Generator

Which has about 10 forks on that website.

Also, when you are dealing with that company, make sure to get some extra gauge steel underwear, or you will get some fleshy meat in between your buttocks some day. See the thread below for more info. There is a bit of and in that thread, but for me as a happy KiCad user it's more like 

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/altium-is-killing-off-perpetual-ad/

It's your choice, but I would not create an account with that firm myself even if I was getting paid for it.

[joelaguirre92]

There is not much to review here.

Your "gerber" directory has empty files except for some headers, and for the rest I only see a 3D model of the PCB + parts, but no tracks on the PCB.

How do you do a 555 project without resistors?

Your project pretty much looks like:

https://circuitmaker.com/Projects/Details/Dan-Gillham/555-PWM-Signal-Generator

Which has about 10 forks on that website.

Thank you for your recommendations. I will try to take a look to those projects and get more ideas for my own project. Actually, is the first time I tried to share this. Here is a link that I guess you can open my project in Altium 365.

Also, when you are dealing with that company, make sure to get some extra gauge steel underwear, or you will get some fleshy meat in between your buttocks some day. See the thread below for more info. There is a bit of and in that thread, but for me as a happy KiCad user it's more like 

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/altium/altium-is-killing-off-perpetual-ad/

It's your choice, but I would not create an account with that firm myself even if I was getting paid for it.

The point doing in Circuit Maker is because free. In my job I used AD and is easy to use the tool in the application. I tested kiCAD but I need to get mor practice on that.

What is the path would you recommend me to continue. Working with kiCAD?

What I am looking is to get experienced and get a portfolio to sell myself in future in new jobs.

Thank you

[Doctorandus_P]

My best guess is that having experience with PCB design is 80%, and knowing which buttons to push in your software is the other 20%.

For the schematic design:
* Knowing how do draw a comprehensible schematic.
* Balance between connecting with wires, or using labels (and that horrible boxes drawing that is popular lately).
* Knowing electronics in the first place.
* How to handle simulators, knowing their strong points and their limits.

For the PCB.
* Footprint placement for optimal design.
* GND planes, GND planes and more GND planes.
* How to design for EMC.
* Signal integrity, differential pairs, crosstalk, separating digital / analog stuff.
* Probably many more subjects...

If you already know how to design schematics / PCB's then getting to know another PCB design program is probably a few days to weeks to get the basics, and a few months to get really up to speed and productive. But it also depends on your learning tempo, how much effort you put into it and how complex and user friendly the software is.

For the rest, I'm not qualified to advise you. I am very happy with KiCad myself, but it's also the only modern PCB design suite I know. Most others don't even run on Linux, and that's an immediate show stopper for me. KiCad is getting more widely used in the last few years. When autodesk bought eagle, a lot of the users of the "free" version switched to KiCad (and from what I hear from them, KiCad is a lot better then the old eagle). I've also heard of some people switching from altium to KiCad because KiCad is "good enough" and they find it hard to justify the cost of altium (Imagine companies who do maybe one or 2 PCB's per year to put in their own products).

I'm not sure how to interpret your question about KiCad. Do you want to know whether it's worth learning KiCad, or how to start learning KiCad?
There is: https://docs.kicad.org/8.0/en/getting_started_in_kicad/getting_started_in_kicad.html
There are lots of tutorials on youtube, and there are complete courses on those "courses / learning sites".
KiCad also has a very active user forum.

[Sagar]

Your designed PCBs looks good, I just want to add something if you are planning to design some reproducable boards for manufacturing. And want to manufactuer these board then the best learning way is to check the capabilties and blog section of a manufacturer website. These blogs will help you in design for example in Signal and RF PCBs the problems of EMI, EMC and noise is more common. In embedded system PCB high frequency tracks, USB differential pairs and other high-speed communication we not routed well then show unpredictable behaviour. In the Mixed signal design analog and Digital part should be separated from each other and there are a lot more precautions when we jump to 6-layer, 10-layer PCB. Which are covered in these small blog articels. I will suggest to write down some basic points/notes in the notebook. So that whenever you design a PCB, can go through them once. I have one website named JLCPCB here:https://jlcpcb.com/blog, you can go through the blogs and may refer other PCB design books, webpages and youtube videos(like Phil's lab).