@rimonkayastha

Problems and Struggles - Routing Process

Worked on routing my PromptPad PCB. (Context: my second ever time routing a PCB and I was super motivated once I completed the schematic)

BUT, turns out, routing traces between 11 components is far from easy. Traces conflict with each other and if I make some 4-5 connections, suddenly, there’s a pad that has no space to connect with a microcontroller pin. So, I rerouted my PCB 6 times before sketching it roughly in my notepad and finally working out the connections between switches. (with big long loops)

You might think the work’s done. I did. But then, I checked the schematic and compared my PCB. Turns out, the switches were in the WRONG ORDER the entire time!! Maybe that’s why it was so difficult to reroute them ugh.

But, it’s my blunder however trivial it seems. Maybe I just jumped at it before looking at more tutorials. I’m planning to look at the HackClub resources more and also explore routing on multiple layers (which I didn’t know about until just now).

Side issues: Also, I did more than 1 hour of work on the PCB editor and I even recorded it using lookout. But, I can’t access my timelapse session and for some reason, I think my PCB project didn’t save itself automatically every 1 minute (even though I enabled it in preferences) so the KiCAD-Wakatime app only recorded 5 mins of work instead of an hour once I saved my project at the very end ;-;

Finished the schematic for my PromptPad. It’s my second ever schematic after the practice schematic I made while navigating HackClub’s hackpad tutorial.

I have probably worked more than 30 minutes on the schematic but noticed I hadn’t kept the kicad-wakatime application running in the backround.

It was pretty fun learning about matrix wiring. I had some confusions about what ghosting actually looked like, but learning about the solution was pretty interesting.

I noticed that the other projects already have an OLED module in their schematic but I chose to follow the guide and use a generic 4 pin connector. I then downloaded a footprint for a 128x32 4 pin OLED which I will use for routing the PCB. I also wanted to add the SK6812 MINI-LEDs but I don’t seem to have any open pin for that.

Feedback would be much appreciated!!