Blog entries tagged with "kicad"

After the success of designing and ordering my first custom PCB I continued on with designing a board to hold the RGB button and microcontroller behind the faceplate. This time I was able to use existing footprints for the D1 mini, resistors and a terminal block for power:

When I went to order these boards I realised that postage for a small order was most of the cost, but I could add other boards to the same order for the same postage cost. I was already planning on adding another not a clock to the lounge room, so why not order boards for that instead of hand soldering more proto boards:

I maintained the same D1 sheild PCB size as that fits nicely within the clock enclosure and I did try designing the two pieces to be a single board that you would break into two, but I couldn’t quite figure that out, so separate boards was the end result.

As I was getting more comfortable with KiCad I moved on to a more ambitious (for me) project, a PCB for my MQTT controlled FM radio. At this point I decided to keep using the relay shield, so I needed two sets of D1 mini headers, power in, power out via the relay, a button, an LED indicator and of course the FM module:

I felt that four different PCB designs was enough to split the postage over, so I submitted the order and today received a satisfying delivery:

Some months ago I put together an indicator panel for my dishwasher using a D1 mini and shields that I already had:

Every so often I would look into options for making it less obtrusive when mounted to the wall and I came across two options for RGB buttons that I was thinking I could mount into a wall plate:

These were looking promising, until I got to the price… €14.99 and US$9.90 each which meant that I continued looking.

I don’t know what I was searching for, but I stumbled across some RGB illuminated buttons on ebay and as I could get six of those for the price of the above buttons I decided to give them a try. So after a week or so of wating they arrived and I was able to quickly hack together a proof on concept:

This is a D1 mini running ESPHome, the button press is a simple button input while the LED is using three output pins for the discrete red, green and blue LEDs within it. This was a quite tenuous setup with the leads just shoved over the (different sized) pins of the RGB button. I needed to have a better connection, and also a way to mount it.

Like the two ready-made buttons I needed to mount this to a small PCB, but where would I be able to find one? Could I make something out of breadboard?

Or do I finally do that thing I had heard other people do? Design and order by own custom PCB?

I didn’t really know where to start, the first tool that I found which didn’t require an online account was KiCad. That was a tool that I had heard of, and I saw that it had a plugin to export to PCBWay, which a PCB company that I had heard of.

I definitely didn’t start this off easy because I couldn’t find these RGB Buttons as an existing part within KiCad, however the ebay listing did include specifications so I headed off down the path of creating my own footprint (the physical layout of the part) and then using that on a board.

From this information:

I created the footprint for the part:

Added it to a schematic and laid that out on a pcb:

Waited a week for a parcel to arrive containing a small stack of green circuit boards:

Onto which I quickly soldered on an RGB button and headers:

The idea was to use the four holes in the corners for standoffs that would be glued to the back of a blank faceplate with a suitable hole cut out. I didn’t bother with glue but did cut a hole and was able to preview what it would look like:

That will blend in a lot more than the current blue PCB. I’m not going to use this as is, I’m considering a proof of concept as I think I can design a board that holds the RGB button as well as a D1 mini, why try to wire up components behind the faceplate when the PCB can do that for me…