I’m trying to learn KiCad by following an example PCB shared by a user on another forum. It’s a clone of a keyboard that he likes and has successfully had manufactured and sold PCBs to other users.
After getting help here with the schematic side of things, I’ve now run into making sure I’ve got the correct footprints. Still trying to understand the design and how everything connects. I’m way in over my head but this is for fun so time is not a factor.
There are several " Headers " in the original design that are simply break out or connection points for USB. I managed to pull the SPI, Expansion and Power headers footprints from the original KiCad project but am having no luck understanding how to get what basically boils down to a solder jumper out of the original design.
What would be the proper way to create this footprint beforehand ? Not sure it can be resized or user defined after assigning all footprints ? Hopefully the pictures below suffice. I honestly have no idea how you’d define a footprint beforehand on this design until after laying out the traces and seeing where they ended up.
You can define a footprint (but at the moment of footprint design, you define fixed pad dimensions and clearances), so basically you’ll have to adjust your track to the footprint at he layout phase.
Other approach would be to just expose the tracks in the Soldermask, this you can do by adding a graphics polygon on the mask layer, over your tracks that you want to be able to put solder bridge on.
You can ofcourse create your own footprints, and the simplest would be to put 2 SMD pads close to each other, but there already are a bunch of “SolderJumper” Footprints in KiCad.
Just open Pcbnew, press “o” to add a footprint, click on the board and then type in “solder” in the searchbox.
I guess you want to extract the individual footprints from the pcb layout.
If so, File-> Archive footprints -> Create new library and Archive Footprints will create a library with a copy of every footprint of the layout.
You may also be interested in the GH60.
It’s a quite popular Keyboard designed in KiCad by: http://blog.komar.be/projects/gh60-programmable-keyboard/ and you can buy loose PCB’s, housings, fitting key’s or probably also complete kits and soldered keyboards directly from Ali / Ebay / Banggood / China / etc.
I’m changing the layout to more of a left hand keyboard. So an off the shelf PCB isn’t really an option right now that I can find.
@pedro I had no idea we could do that, thank you for sharing. It does pull all of the footprints into a library but the jumper does not come with the rest. I’ll use @paulvdh’s suggestion and just make my own. Using the measure tool and altering an existing jumper to match should be fairly simple.
Yes, I do have the schematic. I did realize that’s exactly what it was after turning layers off and on to see what the jumper was. I was under the impression that I would need a footprint to assign to it before populating the board for layout ? Haven’t got that far yet so I wasn’t sure.
I did manage to create a footprint that matches what’s in the original design even though there was no footprint used.
That would explain why the footprint isn’t exportable. Thank you for taking the time to check. I just created one that’s similar in size to what’s displayed on the board and will go from there. Now to figure out how the Reset is triggered in the controler. Might be firmware.
