July 10th - Schematics!!

Goal

Today, I wanted to finalize the BOM and get everything on to the KiCad Schematic, (making sure nothing gets fried :)

My Circuitry

Throughout this whole learning experience of creating the BOM, researching electronics, and so much more, I found it helpful to explain things so a 5 year old can understand it, so hopefully my explanation of this circuit does it justice :)

My design works by taking power from a battery, not shown on the schematic, and controlling it with a sliding switch. For a microcontroller, I used an ESP32S3. To track posture, I used an IMU, with a super long name that if you care for, you can find it as the big square at the bottom of the schematic
I also used a simple coin motor.

Ultimately, this monstrosity was formed, with those key components and a whole bunch of researching in regards to capacitors, resistors, and so much more. (Any “pause” in the timelapse was me researching what to do because I didnt want to screw it up)

Some stuff I found along the way

I had to learn how to import footprints, and what to do when there arent any to be found.
I ended up having to use the command prompt and a tool called easyeda2kicad to find footprints for the slide switch.

Issues and Problems i encountered, because of course there are.

Although I found out that I had to use easyeda2kicad, I ran into problems with it. Most notably was that it didnt work lol. This had a simple fix of just adding a python -m command to the beginning of the command. Worked like a charm after that.

When doing the electrical check, I ran into a whopping 18 ERC Errors!!!
15 of these where solved simply with a cool feature that most people already know but I didnt, called the No Connect flag, which marked that I didnt use some of the pins on the XIAO and IMU. I guess they want me to use all of them :/
The last 3 occured because I did not include the battery in the schematic, so there was no power. (the battery would be connected through a cable, not soldering, so it didnt matter). I used another flag tool called the Power Flag to fix this.

Of course, there where so many more problems, but I dont want to bore anyone reading this, so just enjoy the timelapse (I hope it looks cool)

Next Time

Next up is the PCB itself, how exciting!