 And welcome. Our next talk is mostly, oh, I prepared something. It's about this. This relatively ugly piece of electronics might also look like this. Jaden will talk about how they work and the question and answer session will answer your questions. And welcome, Jaden, to the presentation. Yeah, hi. As said, I will talk about how you can turn a deaf board, how you can move from a deaf board with cables all around to something proper, looking like this, a proper PCB. However, let's get starting. I'm Jaden. I use female pronouns. I'm 19 and I currently go to school. I'm doing my university entry exam and you can see me on Mastodon and maybe on my website. When the talk is done and you still have any questions, please hit me up on Mastodon. What are we talking about? How can I turn all my cables to a proper decision? Do I need all the parts? Is it a good idea? What I build? How can I turn that into a PCB design? How can I get made? How can I have produced? How can I get all the parts? How can I assemble everything to a functioning and beautiful looking result? First of all, we need an idea. An idea I had was back then when an e-ink display was something new. I wanted a proper looking e-ink display and that was the idea I continued with. First, you think about what can I do? Usually you have an example circuit with a deaf board and you build it. In the first method, you don't look at details because that will change anyways. So you look at what do you want to do? You create it on paper. It does not need to be beautiful. It can just be a doodle and you collect more parts. You need an e-ink, you need a battery, you need a CPU. That's the easiest you can do in the beginning. Just draw everything. Then the fun part starts. You have to build it. In the beginning it's a whole mess with cables and a lot of mixed up parts. But that's the most fun part of it. And when you have something, you build it. You build it, you test it and start again. Until at the end the functional, it works. It works the way you think it should work. It probably will take several weeks or at least hours. And with the time you find all the small mistakes. Once that is done you have a whole bunch of cables and everything works. But it does not look that good. How can you bring that to somewhere else? I don't want to have the e-ink display on a table with all the cables. Maybe I even want to have it in a beautiful way. Then you get the idea. Why don't I create a PCB? The second question is how do I create PCBs? Is that expensive? Is that complicated? What do I think about? That is something that is overwhelming in the beginning. You get too many resources and information and they don't agree with each other. The first step you draw the circuit you have created. You can just write Arduino and block and just look at the eye open. You can use Eagle from Autodesk. There is a free version. Then there is the free software keycat and there are different projects. I did all my projects in Eagle. There is a student version that is free. Eagle is a good program. I remember correctly it was free at some point and it was bought up. What did I build? I have a deafboard here. If I use a Raspberry Pi, I don't recreate a Raspberry Pi. I use it as a finished component because it is quite difficult to create a Raspberry Pi PCB. But if I use an Arduino or something with an ESP, it is usually quite easy. Most deafboards have public schematics. The Arduino schematics are publicly available. You can look at them and copy the parts you used. That is the next step. Which parts of the deafboards did I actually use? Usually they are very simple with the ESP. They have voltage regulators and everything else on the PCB. They perhaps use the shield and they have converters on them. Then there is the question depending on how much you know. If you draw it and look at what the parts do and just google, you usually see what is connected to which. For example, I have an ESP module and then I have a logic level converting on 5V. Then I have a sensor in 3V and then I convert it back down. You don't need that. It is unnecessary, it is expensive and it just takes up space. With this method again and again, which parts do I actually need? Which parts are redundant in this case? Something that is on there twice. For example, voltage regulators. You can use one slightly larger rather than having 10 different voltage regulators. As long as everything runs on one voltage. That is quite easy. It is quite easy to find that. You have to look at the parts available to you but it is quite feasible to optimize. If I don't use parts at all, for example Arduino, it is possible that I don't use the USB port. Then the question, do I flash the software via USB? You can also program it through the programming interface. Then you don't need the USB interface. The same with ESP. If you don't want to use the USB, you don't need the USB interface. They are quite expensive. The standard USB interface that works quite well is not on most cheap China gadgets anymore. It costs a few euros and you only need it for flashing and never again. Then the question comes up, what do I do with the thing? Again, when I am using shields all around the deaf board, are there any special components? Again, looking at the schematics, I can turn them into my schematic. That is a question I have again and again. I have some strange components on there that I just can't find online. Some strange things. Usually there are replacement parts. Sometimes they have a pin somewhere else. You can find the alternatives. It is a lot of searching, the internet and forums, looking at data sheets. You sometimes need an hour to find a replacement part for one specific part on the original deaf board. Maybe you have to change something at the circuit and not a resistor. Usually it is not hard to build it in a way that you have all the parts that you need. At the end, once it is done, it looks something like this. This is an example project. It is an USB module in the bottom. And then there is a strange plus like circuit that the voltage regulator for an ink display. This is an area where a strange part is. There is this MOSFET that is really strange on the original deaf board. And I had to use a different one. I had to adapt the circuit, but it works. The parts on the top is a voltage supply. That is something used for all parts and not just one. On the side there is the contact for the ink display. You need to put your time in for that. It is hard and I am really honest about that. You have to redraw it, think about it again. That is not something you do in the afternoon. Once the first circuit is done, you will notice that probably you have to change something there. But that is the way it is when you develop electronic things. Especially when you start from the beginning. You don't think about every small component. Now that the circuit is done, the more interesting part starts. The design of the PCB. For example here. These two PCBs, one is more than twice as large as the other. But it is the same circuit. They in principle do exactly the same. But the form factor is completely different. And that is the same when you do a PCB design. And again, this is art. It is drawing. You use your software. Usually the same you used for creating the schematic. And you auto place the part somewhere. And it is roughly placed the way you do it for the schematics. That is easier in the beginning. You rebuild your schematics with real parts. And you can just look at it and compare it with the circuit diagram. And that is why this PCB is so much larger. I rebuilt the schematics. And if you are really fancy, you can print the schematics onto the PCB. You don't have to look at the schematics while debugging. Once you have something that really works, that you can debug. And then you can shrink the electronic part. Maybe put it into an existing case or something. Then parts on both sides. In the beginning for debugging it is quite a bit bad. And even for hand soldering it is a lot of work. But if you want to put it in a small form factor. If it is supposed to fit in an existing case. You can think about it. Many of the PCB design software already know. Already can create 3D module from your PCB. That is especially easy because you can just take the design PCB model. And just put that imported into Fusion 360. And just say, hey, I built the fitting case around it. And you don't have to measure and calculate. You can just import it and use it. That is quite handy. And that is why I use Deal because it is quite easy. It is Autodesk. Whether you want to use Autodesk or not, it works. I have parts everywhere. They are not connected. And the next step is routing. You connect every part with the parts. It might not be the same as the schematics. Because the connection points of the parts are different than the schematics. Sometimes you have not connected connections that are not used. And with routing you have to connect all the parts. And usually the software already draws lines. Which parts have to be connected where and to you. And only allows these connections. That is quite handy. Next you have to look at, do these connections work at all? Are they looking good? And something a lot of software is able to do. You can do auto-routing. The software does the routing for you yourselves. But in the end there is a PCB that is hard to debug. It tries to fit it as small as possible. And sometimes there are strange things. Auto-routing does not work that good. In the end you still have to do work. I would prefer to do it by hand and know where every trace is and what it does. And I don't have to debug the automatically created PCB from some strange software. With larger projects when you look at a Raspberry it is different. You have so many connections. You can't just keep all of them in your head and understand them. But with small projects that is a feasible way, a realistic way. Next step, routing by hand. How do you do that? It won't work for the first time. Because you will have to layer traces and that doesn't work and you won't find a different solution. It takes time. Several hours. Even the small PCB I showed a few minutes ago is 12, if not 20 hours of routing until it is in this form. Maybe I shrink the PCB a millimeter and something always happens. So don't be frustrated when something does not work. Something you forget in the beginning. The PCB is usually dual sided. So here where all the parts are soldered it is one layer. And on the backside I can also create traces. Every software is different but you always have to think about using both layers. If you have something really small and you have it really small you can add additional layers 3, 5. Where you have traces within the PCB. But that's quite difficult to debug because you can't see all corrections. And it's quite expensive to have them created. It's like drawing. It's something like art. You have to exercise. You have to get good at it. But you can do it and you get it in the end. None of these PCBs follow any norms. And usually, for example, this is the drawing of this smaller PCB. It's quite a mess. The blue lines are the back layer. The red lines are the front side of the PCB and everything else is through. And the white things are printed text. It's quite messy but you see both layers. And this is the drawing. You draw these lines and you have to do it to connect it. The regulations is a thing. Usually you say we have a mess at the ground everywhere and you just score the traces you want. But in the end, if a real PCB developer looks at this PCB, he will fall down and won't say, hey, you don't do it that way. But the things you want to build for yourself, you don't want to sell, you want to use commercially. But something you just want to use at home just for fun. It's unimportant whether you follow the appropriate rules. And as long as you don't start with high voltage electronics, you can't care about it. In the first case, a component breaks. So don't be afraid of all these norms and regulations. If you really want to sell something, you should have that certified. Because you need a specific certification to have your own PCB certified. That's something you need if you are in a company and just don't have a hobby project. As long as it works, that's fine. And you don't harm yourself. It's a project from Replay. In this case, I don't know whether you know it. It looks like this. It's a small PCB. It looks more beautiful than being perfectly designed. That's normal. You don't need something perfect. It's DIY stuff and it doesn't need to be perfect and fitting to all regulations. Once you're done and your design is ready, you take the next step. You have to create it. PCBs can be done at home. It's a lot of work and it's messy and it won't be perfect. Especially not the first time. And it's not that cheap. Nowadays, it's cheaper to use an online shop that creates the PCBs for you. Most of them are somewhere in China. 30 PCBs, for example, or JLC PCB. They do that on a rather bad, more or less bad circumstances. You get your PCBs quite cheaply and in sufficient quantities. I order 10 or 50 at the time. 50 of these small PCBs showed you $16 including shipping. It took 3-4 weeks, but that's the way. You also order all the other parts online and they take several times. They use these Gorba files and they contain everything they need to create the PCB. It's all in this file or it's several files inside the Gorba file. I select a color for my PCB. They are different colors. You can choose one. You should get them from your software. There's also the possibility to get some flexible sheets. You can experiment what you want. If you want something, maybe use a flexible vent. You must be careful with which parts you use so you don't bend a trip or something like that. But there are many possibilities. I've ordered my PCBs, so where do I get my parts from? That's a step that happens twice. Once when I design the PCB just to see if I can actually get these parts. But then I have to actually order them. There are online shops. I listed some here. There are many shops that are German. International is Reichelt. German one, Aro or Mauser are international. You can get your parts there and you have to look where you order them. You can just choose by your parts of your choice. You can buy them where you want to. It doesn't matter. Parts are the same. If they have the same dimensions, it's the same values. Important, always buy more parts than you need. Something will break. All the PCBs I've shown you are either un without parts or broken. Because all the ones that did work, they are built into some devices. If you do it for some time, you will have many broken PCBs. But it's always funny to see where errors happen. Something can go wrong when soldering. More like that soon it could be that a part is defective or something traces not there on the PCB. Things will happen. Don't worry too much. Order more than you need and you'll be fine. I've ordered all my things. I have some time for a latte or coffee or tea or something. Now it will take depending on where you ordered. Take a week or maybe two or three or four until everything is there. If you have all the parts until everything is there. So that you can start to build. And that is important. Wait until all the parts are there. It's not useful to solder a half done part. So not to solder now. You can start soldering now. Soldering is if you haven't done it too much or if you're just starting again for a long part. It's work. It's real work. It's tiring. It takes time. And you should take your time. You should take a Saturday evening or the whole Saturday or a few hours on an afternoon and then do that. I had the luck last year that I could do that more or less professionally. And so I had much time for such projects. But it takes its time. If you have done your first two or three versions of your PCB it will get faster. So print the schematics and the design. It's very practical, very important. Especially if you have access to a plotter to print it in A3 or A1 and put it up on the wall. That is really, really useful. And you can draw into it like you have to take care of soldering set. But that part or that part is in bag three. I sorted my parts in bags or in cases and wrote it onto the plan. That makes it far easier to work because the workflow is much faster. Everyone has to find its own way and its own time how to do it best for yourself. Then one of the basic thing is you start with the smallest and the passive parts. Those are usually the cheapest and that's not so bad if they get too warm for a long time to solder them on and look and then solder on the more expensive part at the end. The most expensive part at the end so if you destroy the PCB during soldering the expensive part and waste it. And then it's as an SMD, it's more of a design question but it's important when soldering. SMD parts, which I've done my PCBs are parts that sit on one side of the PCB that are very small. If you're experienced with that, you can do it. But a beginner who hasn't soldered SMD you should probably not do that. You should probably use through-hole parts as they are called. And you can design a PCB with that. It may not be as small as a PCB with SMD parts but it's easier to solder. But there are many different sizes of SMD parts. If you look at the lower side of a Raspberry there are parts that are smaller than a millimeter. You usually do not want to solder those by hand. There are size guides. Some guides you get on fares. You can get them on fares. You can see the sizes and see how big it is. And if you do not know this, you can find someone and I have a space. How big you should choose your SMD part if you want to solder is. Otherwise the size tables are normal. You can look online and then can look what you want, how many millimeters you want so you can solder is. If you do not have equipment for soldering which is especially for SMD parts you cannot use a two euro soldering iron but you could not be a problem. You can get cheap equipment. Some of those kit kits that come like 20-30 euros around that. You do not need the vela soldering iron for 400 euros. You do not need that in the beginning. You will need it if you do it for some time. You can just look that you get that one what you need. Of course you can go into a hacker space. They usually have equipment sometimes even more expensive equipment but you can just ask there if you can use that or if someone can help you or if you can use their equipment. Or if you can look if you get some support there is no problem to just ask. If I am done with soldering then before I power it up I do anything I look at the PCB are all connections good? Do they look good? This is especially important if you solder SMD if you birth parts like this here that has a length of 2 cm 24 pins they are half a millimetre apart from another and you have to look with a magnifying lens that you have not actually shorted those pins. That is difficult when soldering but you can do that. If you have done that and you look whether there are no unwanted connections and then if you have done that and you should in places where you are not sure you should test the connections electricals. Most multimeters have some kind of beep mode where you can just beep through the connections the signal or the optical signal if there is a connection you should do this especially for important connections like is plus and minus connected you should really do that and you should really take the time to do these tests and should look that all parts have good contact it could be like with your cobbled soldering point that have some electrical contact but have bad electrical contact but there is a really high resistance in the soldering point and then some integrated circuits won't work correctly and then if you have all that and you say okay I am sure that this will work and then I have to admit I have to write that I have written that down but sometimes I just connected to power but have more than one that has just went up in flames so if you power it there are two possibilities it works or it is a steam engine or a fog engine depending on which parts which parts have been defective or destroyed the easy thing if it smokes it is easy to see the part that smokes that is once broken but if it just doesn't work correctly then you have to find out which parts didn't correctly work this is a story from two years ago I spent like two months looking for an error on a finished PCB and I couldn't find it and then after two months I found out that one part I got from my distributor was defective and finding this error was very very much work but then I found it and within ten minutes everything worked like I worked it was simple but it took two months until I found this broken part which I thought had been working another problem is the connection might be wrong this has been the case with this PCB you see well you probably won't see too much there is a plug connector there is a plug in and that is with white part this was mirrored in the PCB I had to solder it on reverse those errors can happen and those errors do happen and well you can't do much about that that something just happens and you shouldn't be sad about that it happens then you can as I said the circuit consists of several parts the first thing I can look is my voltage supply working and do all parts get the correct voltages or is a microcontroller job is the correct software on there so you can test all the separate parts of the circuit separately sometimes it is even useful to just solder on parts of the circuit on the PCB so you can see if the rest works even if the rest is done it is also useful to order several PCBs because you need PCBs to test or if you have an SMD if it is always soldered on you do not solder it off again to correct something you just make a new one you are getting them off again it is really hard if you found you replayed the part that was broken and see if it works or in the worst part there is actually an error in the PCB so in the PCB I have shown the wrong connector I switched the data pins of the USB port so it did not work there are some tricks to fix errors on a PCB so you can probably cut some connections with a sharp knife and then do some thin wire to make new connection that is good for debugging you can do that it looks something like this you see there are parts that are bridged over there is a bit of wire from one of the directed circuits somewhere down to the other directed circuits many wires are soldered on to measure some things it looks like that and you see here the plug that is soldered on in reverse to how it actually should be the PCB design is really fun sometimes you have some problems like it is fun you have a lot of tricks to do especially looking back it is funny so if you have everything done and everything is as it was and you can just start from the beginning I can correct all the errors that I have found in my schematics draw it new and then repeat and repeat and repeat and then in the end you have like four revisions of the same circuit but at the end you have something you have just a solder on put on the program and that works and that is a really really good feeling but it takes long to get there so that is what I say when you are designing PCB you shouldn't say that it does not work at the first time but you can't expect it won't do that just continue do not lose the fun we do that for fun not because we want to earn money if you want to earn money with that we have other possibilities we do that for fun and you shouldn't lose the fun if it doesn't work on the first time same thing with everything but if you write software for one of these PCBs can happen that things don't work for example when developing this project I switch from C or ASP module to MicroPython because it is far easier to develop with MicroPython because there are many resources for MicroPython and the several programming languages but just as an aside so now I have everything done everything works I have my four or five revisions comparing on how much it took congratulations you have developed your first PCB that PCB that doesn't work of course it sounds easier than it is and it even doesn't sound that easy there were many steps in this it's much work it took like two years until I had something that did really work after school but something different but it's not different for you after school or work but yeah it's fun and you shouldn't lose the fun and if you stay with it you will make it get it from me what I wanted to do I just wanted to give it over you and my idea was that we now speak about projects from you ideas or questions or suggestions so as I said if there are any more questions after this talk we can just write and master it on and yeah and I would like to ask questions there thank you for your talk very very interesting things there have been some questions yet I think we just start with the first questions hi thank you for your talk we have several questions here let's start with the first questions here are there standard norms for pin usage is there you know pin 1 is always ground pin 27 is VCC is it important to find out everything there are no real norms that anything has to be anything that's why for every component you have there are dozens of datasheets and eagles at least probably you can get a library with the components of that manufacturer and there are all the necessary data and that's where the software is really useful but you don't have to do search everything but there is no proper norm for that thank you next question is more towards technology how do you work around hf erhas high frequency is black magic according to a friend of mine hf is really really difficult there is something I said before use common ground have ground connections everywhere there is a lot of ground everywhere on the PCB and the data lines just there are ground planes so you have very much ground and there are things like LVDS like the voltage digital signaling where you have a differential signal so if the narrow on the on the trace will always will be removed by the differential signaling and there are things like those silver cages that are on the ESP module that you can do can use but you can could check if you use that but many parts don't do no longer use need this because it has gotten better but that's something you have to look at when you're doing high frequency the next question is in the same direction how is it about layers you mentioned several layers one layer, two layer four, eighteen is there any best practices well what I can say real multi-layer PCBs you find in motherboards or something like that that's unusual for smaller things because they're really expensive there are certainly some norms or because those multi-layer PCBs they their programs usually can do that in some way with multi-layer PCBs that's not a problem you just have to look that you develop those and as I said debugging this is really hard because you have so many layers then we had another question you said this art I think I got the quotation direct do you have examples of projects that are more artistically telling well art brings it quite a lot to the point it's from bleep track I cannot see if you can see that it's picoplane from bleep track it's really really beautiful it's procedurally generated art on a PCB it's also semi-transparent you probably can't see that too well but that it's really more into the artistic direction and if you're really telling a rough barrier or something really big it's also artistic but it doesn't look good it's just a technical art in my opinion it's a form of art and you can really do really beautiful PCBs very expanded there are people who professionally do PCBs professionally and their their business card is a PCB with some circuit on it cool things we all have two links in the pet you can look at after the talk another question or a remark from the stream the info that is a kit space kit space builds from a kit repository one-click bomb orders does kit space say something to you it's just a remark from one of our listeners of what we can just tell that in the patch and that the information I hope I pronounce it correctly it can do with 0805 resisted it's easy to solder with 0603 it's more difficult my experience is with everything in 0603 it's a bit fuzzy you can do that but 0805 is easier so 0603 and the other ones the norms for SMD parts have these numbers 0603 is what I usually use there's another remark there's no clean BGA flux is that something you can say something about if you have other question we had all the questions from the patch if you have more questions write them in the pad and there are other channels as mentioned but you can ask more questions to find a path over the patch we've answered all the questions thank you thank you from me too I wish you much luck with your hopefully not smoke machines see you again