For those interested in the teaching philosophy behind contextual electronics you might be interested in this video - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_9Q4DoUlT8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_9Q4DoUlT8</a><p>He favours diving into a teaching example where the student has little background knowledge and expanding later. While my interests are more in the fundamentals I can appreciate the motivation behind this approach, especially in an online environment where keeping your students engaged is key.
For those interested in pcb design and you're not tied to FOSS I'd definitely recommend trying upverter.com. It's made loads of progress in the last few years and is probably the best / easiest to use layout software for beginners that I've come across.<p>I've worked with eagle, altium, and briefly KiCad but I can never get over the tediousness of using KiCad. I recently checked out upverter and after watching their tutorial was able to design an LCD adapter board from start to finish in ~2 hours.<p>Not trying to knock too hard on KiCad because it's great that we have an FOSS option, but if you're just into tinkering, upverter definitely has an easier learning curve and is pretty powerful. I always find that I want to spend my tinkering time actually getting my project designed instead of fighting with tooling.
I guess KiCad is a good future proof solution for FOSS PCB design.<p>KiCad is now used intensively by CERN teams, and backup by them too.
<a href="http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki" rel="nofollow">http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki</a><p>See the KiCad CERN roadmap (10. is about UI):
<a href="http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki/WorkPackages" rel="nofollow">http://www.ohwr.org/projects/cern-kicad/wiki/WorkPackages</a>
Having used Eagle, KiCAD, and several others, my current favorite is Fritzing. It's quite easy to use and has a large library of built-in parts. Creating new parts is pretty easy compared to other software I've used. Performance leaves a bit to be desired, but this doesn't become a problem except for pretty large circuits.
Fun project!<p>I watched the Building Blinky video.<p>You could improve the video if you hold a loupe in front of the camera lens when trying to zoom in for fine detail, like when you were trying to show us a bridge on two pins.
Hi Chris! Nice job with the tutorial and podcast. I haven't designed a board in a while, but next time I do I'll definitely be putting in some time moving from Eagle to KiCad.
Very nice introduction to KiCad - also for people with a background in other CAD tools like me.<p>It's awesome to have a short but complete example of the whole process. KiCad definitely has some room to improve in terms of UI/UX flow, so that was very helpful.
This is interesting to me because recently I have been playing with the open source spice software, ng-spice, and all of the other tools.<p>I'll make sure to watch the whole series tomorrow morning :)
I'd love to hear from someone familiar with both KiCad and eagle how the library availability compares. Last time I tried the FOSS alternatives, the main pain point was that I needed to create pretty much all the component libraries myself, whereas for eagle someone had usually already done that work.<p>Eagle is a truly terrific program, but I would really like a FOSS alternative. I'll have to give KiCad a try next time I have to do some layout work.
Just adding a note here that gEDA, the GNU EDA suite, is another free software alternative. Its older than KiCAD by quite a bit. I got started with gEDA since I was doing PCB's before KiCAD, and now have invested in tools and libraries and such and don't want to restart. The functionality seems roughly equivalent -- both have their rough edges, just in different places.
Another free CAD program for pcb making is designspark pcb (<a href="http://www.rs-online.com/designspark/electronics/eng/page/designspark-pcb-home-page" rel="nofollow">http://www.rs-online.com/designspark/electronics/eng/page/de...</a>). It's not opensource like Kicad and gEDA, and it's only available on Windows. But it's easy to learn, very polished for free software, and quite capable. Lots of tutorials as well. There is a lot of free software available for hobbyists/makers today and they're pretty impressive compared to commercial software.
Watched the hole series more or less, feel a bit suckerd when the device did not even work.<p>Put your wrists on something when you solder.<p>Long time Amphour listener.