[ragerino]

Congrats on getting it done.

Just mastering Ki-CAD is an accomplishment. I learned circuit design with P-CAD. And it was anything else but intuitive. Playing around with Ki-CAD reminded my of thise days.

Can you recommend a good Ki-CAD tutorial?

Can you elaborate a little bit on the mistakes you made and what led to the choices you made? E.g. first time read about Das U-Boot.

[craigjb]

Thanks! There was definitely a lot of learning involved--I wrote up some here: https://craigjb.com/2019/12/04/gameslab-fails/

To be honest, I really don't know a good KiCad tutorial. I kind of just banged myself against it until I learned. But, I had previous experience with Eagle, Altium, and Cadence Allegro.

Das U-Boot is the embedded bootloader and is pretty standard for embedded ARM systems (and others! https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/tree/master/arch).

On a dev-board prototype before, I had also used Buildroot (https://buildroot.org) to create the minimal root filesystem image. This time around, I decided to use Debian since it makes installing packages I want much easier. For example, I can just apt-get install the USB wifi firmware packages instead of hunting them down and including in a manually generated image. It's still using a custom compiled kernel though, since I have custom drivers for things like the graphics hardware.

I'm trying to use Rust for as much as possible (I like Rust a lot). The STM32L0 runs rust, I bodged together a framebuffer driver in Rust, and the games in userspace are also in Rust. I'll post about the Rust framebuffer driver at some point.

[ragerino]

Thanks a lot! I love that you are using Rust.

[craigjb]

Yeah, Rust is great! I've used it on several production projects for work, but not for extensive embedded work before this. Embedded Rust is getting better and better!

Shout out to the Real Time For the Masses project (it's an RTOS) I used: https://github.com/rtfm-rs/cortex-m-rtfm

[amelius]

Here's a good KiCad tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaCVh2SAZY4

(first video of a series of 10)

[steve918]

Look up Contextual Electronics on YouTube

[lnsru]

KiCad isn’t that hard. There is one tool for schematic entry and another for layout. The most confusing thing for me was part and their footprint management. I ended creating myParts libraries for my own parts in each project. KiCad 5 is really great software with lots of examples.

[diegoperini]

Can you simulate/calculate how voltages and signals behave in Ki-CAD or do you need pen and paper or an entirely different tool to achieve that? What does the entire workflow look like, not jut the circuit layout design?

P.S: I'm the ultimate noob on these topics.

[rowanG077]

There are plugins that can do that. It's called spice[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPICE