I’m a complete beginner to kicad. I’m looking for schematics examples that start with very easy things and become slowly more difficult by adding more and more components (or more difficult examples).
I can then learn by looking at those examples.
Can somebody provide me with such examples or are there websites that offer those?
So to be clear: i’m not looking for tutorials on how to use kicad itself (the user interface, the features, …) because I already found plenty of those but for schematics examples that teach elementary knowledge about how to design schematics and do elementary things with the components.
They should start at a complete beginner level!
Unless I’m mistaken you are asking how to design electronic circuits. This forum has to focus on the usage of KiCad, so your question is more suited for some other forum.
Sorry I don’t have any recommendations. I was tinkering with circuits before the Internet existed. But there must be lots of sites out there that teach electronics.
I’m asking for kicad specific examples (that somebody has created as tutorial files for kicad) I can open with kicad and learn from.
So it’s a bit on the border of learning electronics/kicad.
I doubt there are circuit examples created specifically for KiCad. Generally they are independent of the CAD program and can be realised with many methods including even breadboard. People even talk about migrating designs from say Eagle to KiCad. So KiCad has little bearing on the circuit design.
To use an analogy it’s like asking are there examples of essay writing using Microsoft Word. Essay writing can be done with many tools, including pen and paper.
Edit: Oops
After re-reading your post, I misinterpreted it the first time. At first I thought you were looking for tutorials on how to use KiCad. A tutorial for learning electronics is something completely different.
Are you aware of:
and:
This older post also has a review of a beginners PCB, and hints to improve it.
If you prefer video’s, several youtubers have made video tutorials and they often have a link to some git repository for the project they made.
“Hackspace” magazine has also made a multi part tutorial in their magazine:
But overall, it really does not matter much whether you connect a wire to a resistor, a capacitor or some IC. The principles are the same. I think it’s best to start learning KiCad with a schematic that has around 20 schematic symbols. (About the size of the LoPower2 project) If you start with a smaller schematic then you go quicker through the tutorial, but maybe too quick to absorb the stuff. If you start with bigger a schematic, then it becomes repetitive and tedious, especially when you make some mistakes (which is likely for a beginner) and have to redo a significant part of the project.
But there is no need to re-create the same PCB as used in the tutorial either. You can just as well start with a schematic that has your personal interest, and then apply the same principles and order as shown in the tutorial you are following to the schematic you have. But I do recommend to start with a schematic that is known to work, or else you are mixing learning KiCad, with designing electronics, and those are two different topics.
You can also use RepoRecon. With it you can search though some 18000 KiCad related projects.
In fact many of the things you’ll need to know for designing circuits are the base of electrical/electronic engineering courses. You’ll need to understand concepts like voltage, current, power, and so forth. Then circuit components like resistors, capacitors, inductors. Active elements like transistors. A lot of electrical engineers never design a PCB in their work. PCB design is a specialised aspect of engineering.
Now it’s so much easier for people to learn electronics with components so cheap, and the required power safe to handle. Then there’s the attraction for software inclinded people to learn to write firmware. But the fundamentals are unchanged and independent of how you realise the conceptual schematic with real parts.
This doesn’t obviate the need to understand the principles of electronic engineering, but if you want to understand circuits, the Falstad simulator app which runs in your browser can help. There is a port to HTML5 by Lushprojects which I prefer. They come with a handful of example circuits. With these apps you can draw simple circuits and simulate them right away. These apps should be usable up to a certain complexity. And of course they can’t be used to generate production output for making PCBs.
Yes. I was 13 years old when I decided to become an electrical engineer. Even though I did not understand what I was doing, I made the correct decision for myself. I would do the same all over again if I could.
Before really learning circuit design I looked for some sort of circuit design cookbook and could not find anything. You really need to start from the basics.
One possible exception/route: The year was about 1969. I did find a design for a vacuum tube “infinite impedance detector” and I was able to adapt it to make an AM radio tuner. I built it out of junk parts and it worked when I powered it up.
So…if you can find a schematic diagram for something that you want to build, you might want to start out with that.
If you want to learn some basics, you could start with circuits from other people. Learn the basics of how some works. Go to any search engine and type in electronic circuit projects. I use the duck engine and got numerous websites with some good examples. I’ve found simple power supply circuits to be a easy place to start. You may have other interests.
Once you get the basics of circuits, start looking at some open source electronic projects that include the Kicad files. That way you can download the files and look at how someone else set up the circuit and placed the components. If you have trouble finding open source projects, maybe someone on this forum can make some available for you to look at. I’ve got a couple but to be honest, I’m not that good at Kicad either so you would be better served by looking at someone else’s work who has more experience. To be honest, if someone posted the files for a fairly small project, or even something a little more than a small project, I’d be interested in looking at it just to learn myself.
Obviously, the circuit is the starting point. Everything else comes based on that. Learning circuits is really on other websites. Then Kicad comes after that.
This is not a book, but a website I found by searching on the keywords “learning electronics”. I thought it gave a good staring pont for beginners. Of course if you know more already, skip the parts you know. Or skip the whole thing. Learn Electronics With These 10 Simple Steps
I’m starting to break my own preference to not turn this into a Q+A topic for design which is drifting away from KiCad. However I’ll let this topic run for a bit and see. Some other moderator may shut this down any time though.
There are tons of websites out there. I’m not sure about books anymore. If you need to learn about what components do, this is a good site. It covers a lot and explains it pretty well.
If you can find old issues of magazines like Radio Electronics, Popular Electronics and similar magazines that would be good. While old, still good for learning basics. A transistor is still a transistor. They just smaller nowadays.
Hello?
I want to create a system that can manage Li-ion battery.
I would appreciate it if you could give me some information on what the important factors are.
Hi every One.
I need to create a Cell Phone signal Booster and i’ve tested some equipments.
But i need your help for this project to make a schematic so it would be a powerfull signal booster for all of us.
Thanks in advanced