[sokoloff]

I built custom PCBs for a Halloween costume a few years back. Fairly simple board, but that’s ideal for a first PCB. I installed KiCAD on a Monday, finished the design, ordered boards the next day, and they worked on the first spin. (I’d already bread-boarded everything previously, so this was just the “create schematic and make boards“ phase.)

If you want to learn how to design PCBs, I think it’s feasible to jump in and just start doing it (assuming you know how to design the circuit you want to put on it).

[toybuilder]

I once did a board in Fritzing for a client (strange requirement, but they paid my rate!) -- and I realized that it was actually an accessible route for someone that might make one or two very simple PCBs, ever, on their own.

[sokoloff]

Interesting. Had no idea that Fritzing could even do PCB gerbers. (I'd only played with it once for a few minutes to see how someone else made some pretty wiring diagrams.)

[duskwuff]

It's not very good at it, and I wouldn't recommend it over more capable options like Kicad, but if all you need is a simple 2-layer PCB to connect a few basic components together, it'll get the job done. The results won't win any design awards, but they'll work.

[toybuilder]

Exactly.

What Fritzing has going for it is that it is very simple.

Think of it like firing up Notepad when you just need to print a few words on to a sheet of paper, while everyone else is using Word.

I wouldn't recommend it for anything beyond maybe one maybe two DIPs and some surrounding passives and a few headers/connectors.

[spxneo]

do you have any recommendations on learning material or youtube channels to get started? its fascinating that you can "program" circuits with logic gates and "import libraries" by simply looking for parts

[sokoloff]

I found Chris Gammell/Contextual Electronics content to be pretty good on the KiCAD side of things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVhWh3AsXQs&list=PLy2022BX6E...

(That was a newer playlist than the videos I watched, and I think even that playlist is for an older version of KiCAD, but I found that Chris covered the material in a way that resonated with me, without an excessive amount of time-wasting along the way.)

I had taken a digital electronics course in college (I was Mech E, but we could take EE/CS courses if there was space) which is how I got the basics, but that was back when TTL/CMOS and PALs ruled, which isn't exactly the case anymore. Programming circuits in FPGAs is much newer (and by all accounts, easier/nicer).

BUT:

If you're just starting out/don't yet know which part of a soldering iron gets hot, I'd recommend starting with some Arduinos (clones), then probably do some ESP32 using the Arduino IDE (which is awful but easy to get started with), and that will give you more of a grounding (no pun intended) to set you on a good course for figuring out what you want your first PCB to do.

There are a thousand-plus Arduino makers on YouTube. Most are dreadfully slow-paced once you know the basics, but probably OK paced to start. I'd look at Andreas Spiess, the LED content from Dave's Garage, Adafruit's got a bunch of great content out there, Great Scott is good, Dronebot workshop is the Bob Ross of electronics in some ways, or 50 other channels. For more basic EE topics (including things like understanding decoupling caps, etc), Dave Jones at EEVBlog is great (as is the EEVBlog forum).