Newbie to Kicad wants to create his first PCB

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Hi guys, I’m not new to electonics but far from expert, I know to sodder but haven’t created PCB and would like to create first one for one small project. Also I’m great fan of Amp Hour podcast!

Are there any good tutorials for complete newbies to Kicad?

I would like to learn the ropes, how to put elements, create schematics and then create the board. Are there any good newbie Kicad youtube videos that you would recommend?

Cheers,
Valent from Croatia.

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https://www.youtube.com/user/contextualelectronic/playlists

2 Likes
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The standard tutorial (in the help menu of KiCAD) is also quite nice.

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Good luck to beginner colleague and hello everybody,
I am also new to layout design in general and to KiCad in particular. My environment is Build (2013-07-07 BZR 4022)-stable under Vista.
My study case is a 4 layer board: Control-GND-VCC-Load. Some difficulties puzzle me (as a new user I may not place a screenshot):

  1. Almost all pads on the GND net are marked as not connected despite
    the fact that they all are connected with a via going to the GND
    plane, which has a via connecting it to the GND pin on the board
    connector. Similar arrangement of the VCC connections obviously is
    good for DRC.
  2. Despite the general setting of Thermal Relief for pads
    connection, all GND vias appear without any connection to the plane
    (may explain the previous point), only one VCC via has a 4-way
    connection to the VCC plane, all the rest VCC vias are connected
    ‘solid’. The are no clearance openings around VCC vias on the GND
    plane even when via is necessarily going through the GND plane.

Thanks for reading

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  1. Make sure you’ve re-filled the zone since you placed the vias, sometimes they miss for various reasons. Also double check the zone is set to the GND net.

  2. Generally vias won’t have thermal relief, they aren’t connected to components so there’s no real reason to add it. I’m not sure how you’ve managed to get one via to have a 4 way thermal relief, are you sure it isn’t a through hole component?

If you can upload the design somewhere (github?) it might be possible for someone to give more specific help.

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Thanks Nathan

  1. I refill after every zone editing, besides DRC makes refilling automatically. As to the zone setting I am not sure: there is selection between GND and Net 2 (in my case); tried any with same amount of ‘not connected’ pads, cannot specify both in the zone setting screen.
  2. You are right about the existing thermal relief: it is for a through hole component.

Just figured out that I missed to specify the zone in the GND plane, therefore everything was unconnected. Hopefully, other newbies will skip this silly mistake!
Thanks again, Boris