How To Use KiCad to Make a Printed Circuit Board: Part 1

Welcome to the first ever Skinny Research and Development tutorial. In this episode I’ll teach you how to use the schematic (Eeschema) portion of KiCad to layout a circuit design. This is Part 1 of a three episode series to show how to take a hand written schematic and turn it into a manufactured circuit board.

This is very much a beginners level tutorial and even though I’ve been using the basic portions of this software for nearly 2 years, I still have much to learn myself. My vision is to teach you the basics and then get into some more advanced topics. I’m hoping to give you a new tool while forcing myself to learn some more in depth topics regarding the software.

For this tutorial we will be building an LM386 audio amplifier. Below is the schematic you can use to follow along with the tutorial above.

I tried out this amplifier design yesterday by using it as a headphone amplifier. For that application it works extremely well.

Every episode I’m hoping to make things a little more polished and more helpful. If you have any ideas, please leave a comment below. Thanks!