Material for a Kicad workshop
A three session workshop on designing and assembling PCBs with Kicad. A small group of students will design and build a USB widget. The instructor will provide the basic circuit and guidance. Materials cost will be approximately $20 including PCB fabrication, components, shipping and solder paste stencil. We will place a shared order to reduce shipping costs.
- Silicon Labs EFM32HG309 microcontroller, ARM Cortex M0+, 64 kiB flash, 8 kiB ram USB device interface. About $1.50.
- Connector for 128x64 pixel OLED Display is not included in the parts kit, order one yourself if you want it.
- LEDs
- rotary encoder with push switch
- USB for power and communication, will provide Python code to communicate with it from a PC
- This is about $3 in parts yet demonstrates quite a few things
- Laptop with Kicad 5.1.4 5.1.2 is probably OK. Last time we had a few students using 5.0.x and it was problematic.
- Interactive HTML BOM plugin installed (optional, may require installing python3-wxgtk4)
- Electronics knowledge is not required, but helpful.
- Programming knowledge is not required, but helpful.
- USB C cable (C-C for newer laptops, A-C for older) by last session. I'll have a few on hand.
- Clone or download https://github.com/sethhillbrand/kicad_templates.git
- This is entirely optional. The instructor can flash firmware for you if you are not interested.
- ARM Cortex compiler Alternately, your Linux distro may have a package
gcc-arm-none-eabior similar which may work. - OpenOCD required to flash the firmware the first time and until a bootloader is developed.
- In the fw directory,
make flashwill build and flash the firmware. It assumes an FT232H based programmer with the default USB ID. - usb_comm.py can be used to interact with the device from Python over USB.
On Linux, to avoid having to run as root (change dlharmon to your user), add the following to /etc/udev/rules.d/99-local.rules:
ATTR{idVendor}=="0403", ATTR{idProduct}=="6014", SYMLINK+="ftdi-%k", MODE="660", GROUP="dlharmon"
SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="10c4", ATTR{idProduct}=="8b00", MODE="0660", GROUP="dlharmon"