[TriEmbed] Resources for making PCBs with Kicad

[Charles West]

Hello,

At our last meeting we had a great presentation on PCB design.  One of the
editors mentioned was the open source program Kicad.  It is a nice board
design program that doesn't place any restrictions on board size or the
number of layers.  In the past, however, the documentation wasn't that
great and the learning curve was pretty steep.

I am pleased to report that is no longer the case.  I made a board with
Kicad two years ago and had a lot of trouble figuring out the system.  When
it came time to re-familiarize myself with Kicad and make a more
complicated board, I was worried I would run into the same issues.
However, that was not so.

Now there are a bunch of excellent video tutorials on the subject, which
walk you through all of board building process.  Since they helped me, I
thought I would post the resources to the list (especially since several
people expressed interest in Kicad).

Numato Labs' 10 part Kicad tutorial series (covers the basics from
schematic capture to generating gerbers):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsHTz-ONFw0

Contextual Electronics tutorials (has videos that cover creating new
component schematics and board footprints, which Numato Labs didn't cover):
http://contextualelectronics.com/buildpcbs/

General PCB layout (by a Sparkfun employee):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJKZZArjdg8

Trace width calculator:
http://circuitcalculator.com/wordpress/2006/01/31/pcb-trace-width-calculator/

Thanks,
Charlie West
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