Recently, I made an Arduino UNO that I showed to have better switching characteristics than a commercial board. It was a great project to help me understand how seemingly inconsequential routing practices can lead to issues down the line.

http://www.simonjjones.com/#/posts/golden-arduino

Neat project. These popular "commodity" devboard designs have been remixed and copied so much that it was just missing an open-source design to slot into many existing projects. I can imagine designing a board using one of these designs as a "template" but adding whatever capabilities I need, then knowing it fits a standard footprint.

This is an amazing resource. It was difficult to appreciate what this resource was for until I tried to create my own boards based on an ESP32. It's not really difficult to build around ESP32, it's just that I don't know what I don't know. With starting points like these, I can start with a lot more confidence. Thank you!

This is great. One of my goals is "create my own ESP32 PCB" however I am lacking the knowledge to do so. I was hoping to get some help by an LLM but people here said it's not that great in PCB layout. Still I will try Kicad with MCP :)

Sure I am willing to learn but I need a more efficient path than a complete EE degree. I guess you can get quite far with a reference design but I understood that there's a lot to learn about ground layers, trace widths and so on.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get started on projects like this, specifically alongside kids (very smart 9-13 in range)?

I got them a 3d printer to move them into more "physical" computing, with mixed results.

Any place to have a gentle introduction to PCB boards?

Awesome! It's been a while, but my next level of learning was designing PCBs without breakout boards (and I had several failed revisions). This will be great to learn from.

wow, I've been wanting a "PCB design system" like this for such a long time. I've always found it stupidly hard to just take an existing working board and tweak it.

This is a nice project that I will definitely be looking into for my projects!

Is the intention that you "fork" the PCB design and use it as a base/template for you own schematics/PCB design, or something else?

Awesome.

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