Shameless plug: We just launched an affordable PCB prototyping service in Europe with native KiCad support. The PCBs are manufactured in Germany with a manufacturer usually working for the automotive and medical industry. See <a href="https://go.aisler.net" rel="nofollow">https://go.aisler.net</a> for details.
Nice KiCAD tutorial.<p>"Once you receive your PCBs, you can simply use some solder paste and a hot air rework station to put everything together!" Right. Soldering SMT parts is not easy and takes practice. You need to practice on junk or practice boards (there are $3 kits for this) to get the technique.<p>Here's somebody who's good at it doing it.[1]<p>I sometimes do this stuff, but the magnifier and tweezers thing is hard work.<p>The pros all use lead-free solder now, but most hobbyists are still using leaded solder, which is much more tolerant of temperature variations.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z7nCAxS2Rg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Z7nCAxS2Rg</a>
Not sure about his paranoia over the crystal routing - it's an Atmega, the crystal is 16 MHz. Anyway, I think this is more of a KiCAD tutorial than a keyboard design tutorial (not something particularly high on my list of designs I'd like to do).<p>I keep trying KiCAD but with a paid alternative (Altium Designer) through work it doesn't compare. The key to electronics design is the library. There are a few alternatives which are tied to vendors, like DigiKey's Schemeit. They have decent libraries of parts. I would have figured that KiCAD would too, but the last time I tried it was pretty bad. Hope that's changed.
This is a really nice tutorial, not just on keyboard PCB design but Kicad in general.<p>I also recommend the excellent "getting to blinky" videos:<p><a href="https://contextualelectronics.com/learning/getting-to-blinky-4-0/" rel="nofollow">https://contextualelectronics.com/learning/getting-to-blinky...</a><p>Which teach the basics of Kicad too.