By
@nishadmulay
My first PCB build includes a simple water alarm that can be used anywhere. Near a sewer, toilet, sink, or any place that water could potentially flood. It will deliver power to a very loud buzzer notifying people.
8h 32m logged
Last devlog for the project!!
Kinda sad that this project is coming to an end, but I learned a lot about PCBs, electrical components, circuits and soldering.
What took the most time was realizing that all three pads/pins of the mosfet can’t be soldered together or it will trigger the alarm whenever the battery gets plugged in.
Either way, this was one one the most fulfilling projects ever and it was very fun doing this. I am finished with the project itself, but I still have to work on the GitHub repo and adding some final touches on that. Its also very satisfying to test this project on water and it triggering the alarm.
8h 37m 1s logged
Finished engineered drawings for the water alarm, which will soon go into my first repo!
This is only my second time making engineered drawings. I made these on Autodesk Fusion and I learned a lot. I made an exploded drawing for the first time, and messing around with the animations in fusion was pretty fun.
So far, I have received all of my parts except for the PCB itself. I guess DigiKey takes too long to ship those, but soldering will begin once they arrive. The next steps would also be to finish up the GitHub repo for this project and submitting a demo, before finally shipping it off.
3h 39m logged
The water alarm is finished on KiCAD!
Some few changes and tweaks such as adding a name and picture to the PCB board. Everything was checked multiple times before uploading all the parts to DigiKey for printing.
The next steps would be to place the order, create a GitHub repo, solder all the components, test the water alarm, and ship it off.
2h 37m logged
I have been working on my first PCB using KiCad. It features a small water alarm that can be used in any place where water could flood, such as a sink.
As of now, it uses a buzzer (BZ1), Transistor, specifically a Mosfet (Q1), two resistors (R1, R2), Capacitor (C1), main power input (J1), Sensor block (J2), and an LED (D2).
Challenges: Using KiCad for the first time and learning what each tool does felt overwhelming at first. Some concepts and solutions for the water alarm weren’t covered in the tutorial which led to research and experimentation. For example, while running the design rules checker (DRC) on KiCad, I recieved 2 errors as I didn’t properly wire everything, so strictly following the tutorial wouldn’t always work. It also didn’t cover what footprints I needed to assign to the LED and how, let alone what LED I needed to select.
Although a lot of time was spent on that, I gained the understanding of through hole technology (THT) and surface mount device (SMD) in LED’s as well as how to assign footprints in KiCad.
btw I chose THT as they are durable and easy to solder.
So far, I have spent 14 hours on this project, including research and learning the basics of electrical engineering. I learned many concepts that could be tied together in this simple water alarm. Whether it was learning the function of each part, such as a resistor, or learning something as simple as a volt or an AC/DC current, it truly helped me get a basic understanding of electronics. knowing the symbols for each electronic component allowed me to know what they are and how they work.
