Abusing KiCad to show schematic

[PrzemoF]

I’m putting together an Open Cycling Computer and I decided to use KiCad to document the electrical side. I’m not going to make pcb as it’s made from off-the-shelf modules from adafruit/sparkfun/etc. I need someone experienced to take a quick look if what I did is a good practice in KiCad. The pdf with the schematic is here [1]. As soon as I learn what I need to upload to share the schematic it will be on-line as well.

Potentially I’ll use KiCad in connection with FreeCAD to model the case for the OCC.

Please be harsh, I need honest feedback!

[1] http://opencyclingcomputer.eu/KiCad/occ-schematic.pdf

[paulvdh]

If you want me to be harsh, i’ll tell you I’m getting a sore neck and rotation sickness by your paper use.

Your PDF is formatted in Portrait, while the sheet in the PDF is Landscape, and I’m viewing it rotated to Landscape on a Portrait 24" monitor.

And while complaining about rotation. Why are your symbosl for BMP_280 and DS3231 rotated compared to all the other symbols?

Apart from such small things your schematic looks quite reasonable. It is also by no means abusing KiCad.

If you’ve installed the KiCad examples you can have a look at

/usr/share/kicad/demos/electric/electric.pro

I’ll wish you lots of luck trying to fit something like the screenshot below on a PCB!

I do find the use of a Raspberry Zero for a bicycle computer a bit weird. Why did you choose that? Do you need that horsepower? A small and very power efficient uC can run for a year or more on some small battieries, while your Raspt is likely to suck your LiPo dry in a few hours or days.

Also:
I see no kind of communications module. The Raspi Zero can maybe save stuff on uSD but some RF module to easily and comfortly save data to a bigger computer or phone is something I wished to have a long time ago, for example to keep logs of improvements in practice runs.

How about GPS logging of where you’ve been? Whenever I’m going on a longer trip I take my phone with me with OsmAnd to have a quick peek where I am whenever I’m lost.

[PrzemoF]

Thanks for the comments! The rotation is broken, that’ll be an easy fix. BMP_280 and DS3231 are rotated for no good reason, except the history of the schematic & my learning curve with some other software. I’ll fix that. I don’t need the horsepower of rpi, but I need it’s flexibility. Some microcontroller would be better, but I use the same software after minimal changes (+ external sensor) as digital thermometer for cheese making Also rpi zero W offers wifi + bluetooth + BLE, so it covers all options except ant+ for sensors and data dumping. A GPS was part of the OCC with full position logging, but I fried the chip Any way it will be back sooner or later. Far future option is to include modified version of this [1] for navigation.
P.S… Please don’t look at this project as an attempt to make a product - considering the time it took and it will take I should just go and buy a top line garmin instead I don’t want to go completely off-topic in my 2nd post. More here: http://opencyclingcomputer.eu/

[1] http://nzjrs.github.io/osm-gps-map/