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KiCad Design Workflow
The steps for designing PCBs using an open-source and free ECAD tool
The steps for designing PCBs using an open-source and free ECAD tool
When drawing a circuit, you will often move and delete components as part of the process, meaning that the reference designators (e.g., R1, C1, U1) may be out of order or scattered throughout your design. This tutorial walks through how to reset the reference designators so they are sequential.
Some electrical components will contain an antenna for wireless communication. These antennas can be affected by electromagnetic interference that are near the antenna. A “Rubout area” (also known as a “Keepout area”) prevents traces and components from being placed in a specific location. These can protect the antenna from any interference.
Designs created in an ECAD program may be electrically correct on the screen, but are ultimately constrained by the capabilities of your fabrication equipment. This tutorial walks through how to use the program DFM Now to verify that a design is able to be manufactured by the LPKF ProtoMat S63 in PRLTA 109.
Design Rules Check (DRC) is a tool that looks for a limited set of errors in PCB designs, and generates error messages to help you identify and fix the problem(s). A design that passes a DRC is not necessarily error-free, but rather has passed the limited set of tests that DRC conducts. You can (and should) run a DRC in both Design Entry CIS and PCB Editor, and they will look for different types of errors.
Before exporting your schematic to create a PCB, you must verify the design and fix errors in the schematic 1. It is significantly more difficult to fix errors later (either during the PCB layout stage or after manufacturing) than to spend time double-checking the schematic first.
The purpose of this tutorial is to get you familiar with the MPLabX programming environment to program the PIC18F47Q10 microcontroller to flash a LED.
Many sensors have an analog output that must be digitized using an Analog to Digital converter (ADC) in order to use them in a microcontroller. The PIC’s ADC subsystem is the peripheral used to read analog values and convert it into a digital number for use in your program. It can be configured in a variety of ways. In this assignment, you will create an ADC subsystem and program your microcontroller to transmit the result of reading an analog voltage measured at an input pin, using the ADC subsystem in one of its simplest configurations.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to program a PIC using in-circuit serial programming with the MPLAB® Snap debugger/programmer. This will be critical for your semester project as you will be working with a surface mount microcontroller that cannot be easily removed for offboard programming and does not have a USB port.
A finite state machine (FSM) is a way of modeling a system such that there are a limited number of finite “states” that a system can be in, and that it can only be in one of those states at a time. Events (e.g., pushing a button) cause the system to change from one state to the next. Unexpected events do not cause the system to change states, which is useful for ignoring spurious inputs. Rather than coding for every possible input, you can instead code only for inputs that matter at the given time. The following resources provide a solid conceptual framing and implementation examples:
