Standard/common circuit

Projects
1

Hello.
I’m new to KiCad and electronics. I’m wondering if I can find some standard/common circuit for KiCad, like a dc-dc step-down circuit, battery charger circuit, analog input protection circuit for uC and so on.
Id love to design some simple gadgets, but don’t understand electronics. If I had the basic building-blocks I would be one step closer to possibly creating something.
Thanks.

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Hey @Samba,

I designed a way to get started called “Getting To Blinky”. This is a 7 part course showing how to build a simple 1"x1" PCB using a 555 timer to create a blinking LED. It may seem overly simplistic, but it’s a great way to learn KiCad and a little about electronics as well:

http://legacy.contextualelectronics.com/buildpcbs

I"m also going to move this to the “projects” category, as it’s not actually about the schematic portion of the program.

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Thank you for your reply.
I have found a lot of good tutorials on how to use Kicad, the problem is not understanding how electronics / electricity works so its absolutely impossible for me to design a lets say DC-DC stepdown “system/module” on my PCB as I have no idea of what goes where, what has what effect on what and so on.

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@samba, If you want to dip into fundamentals needed to understand how electronics and electricity works, take a look at this free book written by Tony R. Kuphaldt.
http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/ has the latest revision with worksheets and videos. Be ready to spend at least 6 months on it, there is A LOT of information! The level is between high school and undergraduate college, I find it well written and easy to understand; contrary to some college textbooks I’ve seen.

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Before you get stuck into making your own boards, how about building up some systems using blocks that other people have designed? Take a look at https://www.sparkfun.com/categories where there are loads of little modules to do various jobs. Most of their products are listed with schematics so if you decide to make a PCB after you’ve prototyped the design with modules you can copy the schematic sections into one project. (Copy by re-drawing not just copy/paste, I don’t think Sparkfun use KiCad yet and you learn more by re-drawing the circuit).

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Ready KiCad drawing of “little modules to do various jobs” is what I was hoping to find. That would make is fast n easy to trow together a quick PCB for a gadget.
I guess there’s no shortcuts, I just have to study…

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