How to design a motherboard for your electronics project | Hacker News Reader

How to design a motherboard for your electronics project

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60 pointsfrenchie411115 comments

If folks are interested in best practices to follow when laying out a PCB, I really enjoy this series of videos on YouTube where someone whips one up live over the course of 3 hours.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7-8nUU6e3E

Great tutorial.

I'm currently making a new type of MIDI controller, based on an Arduino Uno; I have been iterating on prototypes with different sensors. It's not very difficult (or time consuming) to solder the prototypes so they're a little more durable than breadboard.

Eventually I would like to make an integrated product that could be manufactured in small batches; but what is the benefit of doing an intermediate PCB using breakout boards? It seems all the real problems will come later when moving from breakout boards to single components?

It definitely depends on what you are building and what you are trying to validate. I use this sort of board to do product validation with early customers. It’s much easier than producing the full DFMed board, and sometimes it’s much faster & reliable than something soldered together. For reference, on my Thermostat project the green hand wired project board took probably 2 hours to assemble, the PCB motherboard takes about 10 minutes.

It’s also great for producing a couple boards when working with other engineers, I can more easily guarantee that we are working with the same hardware setup because all of the connections are made on PCB.

Ah great explanation, thanks!

Nice guide for beginners. Will add this to our Awesome Electronics list: https://github.com/kitspace/awesome-electronics/

That would be awesome, do you want me to submit a PR?

Sure, if you get a chance.

Done https://github.com/kitspace/awesome-electronics/pull/66

This is great, and timely for me. I've got some horrifying rats-nest prototypes in the field that I've been really wanting to replace with PCBs.

I'm looking forward to part two about doing the layout. That's the part where I get flummoxed.

That's exactly where I started when I learned how to do this, glad it could help. If you have any questions about your project specifically feel free to hit me up, I love talking about this stuff

It probably depends on the kinds of projects you do, but this kind of "halfway there" PCB seems like a lot of fuss for not a lot of gain. Why not just design the PCB the way you want it look for the final product, and then, in places where you'd still like to work with a breakout board or something, have jumpers (holes, really) so you can decide whether to let everything pass through the board as it would in the final product or whether it has to go someplace else? I see the author is answering the comments, so maybe they can explain?

Is Eagle a viable alternative to KiCad these days? I stopped using it around KiCad 4. (2015?) At that time, they seemed to be feature-equivalent, but KiCad has been improving fast since then.

If I could start all over again, I'd probably choose KiCad today, but I've been on Eagle for too long and my muscle memory outweighs my dislike of their subscription model at this point

Isn't the free version of Eagle limited to 2 layer designs?

Ah, that is correct. I guess I didn't realize that. I've used it since it was a free project. I'll update my post accordingly

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