📄️ Intro to KiCad EDA
KiCad is a cross platform and OpenSource Electronics Design Automation suite, we can create schematic, design a PCB layout and preview it with 3D viewer.
📄️ Setup Additional Libraries
Not all the symbols and footprint for making a mechanical keyboard PCB are preinstalled in KiCad, thanks to the community who collecting it or even design their own symbols or footprint and publish it as an open source resource.
📄️ Create New Project
Click File -> New Project... or simply press Ctrl + N to create a new project, fill in the name and it will create a new folder with two kicad files. In this case, I will use mechanical-keyboard-tutorial as the project name.
📄️ Create a Schematic
Schematic is a symbol diagram of electronic circuits. We need this to define layouts, routing, and component symbols.
📄️ Create PCB
To open the PCB Editor, just press Ctrl + p or double-click the .kicadpcb file, in this case mechanical-keyboard-tutorial.kicadpcb.
📄️ Creating Production Files
To order the PCB to the manufacturer, we need to plot production files called gerbers, gerbers file are collection of multiple file to be used in plotting machine, we can generate it directly in KiCad PCB Editor.