I am a brand new learner of PCB design. I've watched other videos about PCB design but still had questions like "But am I really doing this the right way?" in terms of some of things I end up doing in KiCad but don't see mentioned by the presenter. I thought I might have been doing things the wrong way, the stupid/ass-backwards way, etc. But Dave's video confirmed that many of the things that I end up doing with my extremely limited experience are the same things Dave does with his many years of experience and more mature PCB design software.
Some examples of what I mean:
1. Measurement standards: Dave mentioned that he constantly switches between imperial and metric. I do too, but attributed it to being a noob. I use metric for board size, edge cuts, holes and trace widths but I use imperial for component spacing and pin alignment. It was nice to see that Dave validated that switching between the two measuring standards is "normal." For some reason I thought people would stick in only metric or imperial and I was weird for constantly switching around depending on what I was doing.
2. Vias: In my current 2-layer PCB design I have no additional vias, but everything is through-hole in my design so I am able to use the component holes as a via instead where needed. I thought vias were considered to be a "last resort" type of thing and to be generally avoided due to the additional resistance each one adds to the circuit, but Dave uses them without too much concern in this particular design. The sheer number of traces going between components also necessitates the use of vias in his case, but it is good to know that using vias is not really too much of a negative in basic DC/low current/low frequency PCB designs. Obviously a high frequency design would need to be concerned about many more things than just vias.
3. Optimization: It is clear that if Dave had more time to spend on the design, he would like to perform a lot of pin swapping in order to simplify the layout. But a person only has a certain amount of time to dedicate to the task so compromises have to be made. It was nice for me to see, as a complete noob to PCB design and layout, that even someone like Dave, who has many years of experience, reaches his limit of time and effort before coming up with a truly elegant layout. And he's OK with that. It is a one-off, after all.
4. Tweaking: While you could argue that this is similar to Optimization, above, I think it deserves its own discussion because I consider optimization to be more general in terms of overall layout and reduction in rats nest crossing before any traces are laid down while tweaking is the nitty gritty individual placement and slight movement of components, tracks and vias to "make it work." Moving a track over to allow another one next to it, moving a via from down low to higher up the board in order to allow a cross trace go through, that kind of thing. It was nice to see Dave doing those things which are similar to what I end up doing in my layouts. I figured that with experience comes less fiddling around, but it seems that PCB design is really an art and every board needs individual attention to detail in a unique way. My problem is that I am such a perfectionist that I will spend too much time on something rather than just "letting it go." Good thing I don't get paid by the hour.
5. Software features: While watching the video, I could completely forget that Dave was using Altium Designer. The overall basic functionality and features that Dave was using for this layout are available in the latest stable release of KiCad (4.0.5) so I could totally relate to everything Dave was doing and follow along as if Dave were using KiCad. As a noob, I had no idea how much additional functionality would exist in a product like Altium but would have no equivalent in KiCad. But at least for this particular non-demanding PCB design, I think everything Dave did in Altium could be done in KiCad in a similar way. The new OpenGL push/shove trace router in KiCad seems to be very close in functionality to Altium's router which was nice to see. I guess my point of this is that even open source software can give someone the power to create good designs - expensive design software is not required. At least for the hobbyist, anyway.
Thanks, Dave, for making this video. I thoroughly enjoyed watching all of it with great interest.
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