For week 6 electronics design, I am not going to lie—I didn’t fully know what I was doing at first, but I went for it anyway. I opened KiCad and started adding the components that I used in my previous project and worked on building out a schematic.
I basically copied what I had already done on my breadboard and translated that into KiCad. After getting the schematic together, I started running some traces on the PCB layout. It wasn’t perfect, but it gave me a good starting point for understanding how everything connects.
One thing I ran into was that KiCad didn’t have all the components I needed, like the IRF520, TMP36, and Arduino Uno R3. Later, I found out that I needed to download the Fab Academy libraries so I could have access to the correct parts and symbols.
Even though this was a bit confusing at first, it helped me understand how to take a real circuit and start turning it into something that could actually be made into a PCB. As always, I used ChatGPT to help me along the way.
Here are the pictures from my design process:
