[junon]

Just play with it.

My workflow (I'm a hobbyist, take what I say with a grain of salt):

- Installed "library loader" which Supports kicad

- Sign up for componentsearchengine.com

- Find parts I need on mouser.com/mouser.de (I'm in Germany) and look them up on component search engine, download the cad files; library loader picks them up automatically

- Use them in the schematic view, get your schematic finished FIRST

- Then "Update PCB from schematic". This imports all of the individual footprints and stuff you need to wire together.

- From here, should be like most other CADs; wire up your rats nest, do your ground fills ("Fill area" tool on the right), etc.

- Export Gerbers and drills after googling "jlcpcb export kicad 6" (they don't have a 7 guide yet but doesn't matter) just to double check the settings, then upload to jlc and they arrive about a week and a half later.

- In the schematic view, go to tools and then Generate BOM. It takes some finagling but you can usually massage the CSV it generates to upload to Mouser's shopping cart page to get an exact amount of parts you need, including the ability to specify multiples. Note that usually upping the amount of small components results in more for less overall cost (yes, really) so play with the quantities. Resistors can be purchased for a few bucks at the 500 to 1000 quantity, and are usually cheaper to do that than to order 5 or 10. Anyway, then you order your parts.

The "use footprints from other people" thing is contentious, I know. Most serious engineers make their own footprints. I don't have the time, personally, since unless I'm missing something it requires freecad for me to get the measurements right, and kicad doesn't have the required constraint solving tools to allow me to make sure I've got all of it right, so the workflow is CRAZY inefficient (lots of importing drawings from freecad, manually creating pads, then using multi-select and align tools to get them where they need to be...).

Kicad with a constraint solver like freecad's would be a ridiculously huge improvement IMO, but hopefully this is enough to get someone tinkering. Kicad devs if you're reading... pleeeeease. I know it's a lot of work.

[fullspectrumdev]

> The "use footprints from other people" thing is contentious, I know. Most serious engineers make their own footprints.

Is there any reason for this to be the norm? Surely that means that “serious engineers” are just duplicating a shitload of effort?

[nunuvit]

Many of the ones you can find took no effort and are untested. A shitty script tried extracting information from a PDF datasheet or converting file formats for the purpose of driving internet traffic to an ad-riddled website.

Many are low-effort and untested. They were manually created by people who don't give a shit because they're not the ones using them.

Some are wrong. It's easy to get mixed up and number them wrong, usually upside down. Even when the issues are known, they rarely get fixed in published models and libraries.

Sometimes you need an engineered design. Pads can be designed for manufacturing, thermal, electrical, and mechanical considerations. Hardly any published pads were made by people who know how to do those things in the first place. Either way, they're not designing for your specific board.

In summary, it would be insane to spend money manufacturing random garbage from the internet, and a "good" pad may not be the right good pad for that board.

[adql]

If you never made a PCB you probably want a tutorial just to get the basics right and not learn them once you already made mistakes and send it to manufacturing.

[voakbasda]

Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want. Expect to make mistakes on your first custom boards, even if you watch every tutorial. Be forgiving of yourself; it’s a learning process.

[junon]

You're going to make mistakes. Expect it. Budget for it. You're a fool if you don't! My first board was laughably bad.