03.05.2025 Elements: PCB Design & Manufacturing, KiCad workshop

This is a beginner-friendly introduction to printed circuit board (PCB) design with a focus on making boards for analog audio circuits. The goal is to give you the basic knowledge and tools to be able to prepare everything a PCB manufacturer needs to make a run of boards!

Software of choice for this workshop is KiCad.

What's covered

• Schematic capture:
  • Schematic organization;
  • Making custom symbols;
• Board layout:
  • Linking KiCad symbols to PCB Footprints;
  • Making custom footprints;
  • Matching the physical layout of a device to the board;
  • 2- & 4- layer board layout best practices;
  • Multi-board assemblies;
  • Making PCB art;
• Manufacturing
  • Preparing files for a board house;
  • Making boards vs making assemblies;
  • Preparing files for assembling the board yourself.

As an extra perk, people who participate in the Elements series of workshops are welcome to join any future Design Days to work on their own circuits and get help. By Design Day we mean Day 2 of Elements 1 & 2 or a dedicated day at the shop that we'll announce separately. Those happen at least once a month.

Prerequisites

This workshop assumes you can read and design basic circuits. If you are not yet comfortable with that, please check out other workshops in the Elements series.

Time & Place

The workshop takes place over a single day. We start at 11am, break for lunch at some point, and finish at about 6pm.

Location is our shop on Weichselstr. 32 12045 Berlin (HEADS UP there are two streets with the same name in Berlin, you need the one in Neukölln, not Friedrichshain).

What to bring & prepare

• Laptop with the latest version of KiCad installed. KiCad is a free and open-source program, you can get it here;
• A schematic you'd like to make a board for (optional).

Cancellations

You have the option to cancel and get a refund up until 1 week before the event. We would of course refund everyone if we have to cancel the workshop for any reason.

Other workshops in the series

Here are some of the other workshops in the Elements series:

• Gain & Tone is our beginner-friendly introduction to analog electronics of audio. The goal is to give you all the tools, knowledge and a bit of intuition to start designing effects yourself!
  
  
• Modulation will go into the basics of control voltage, attenuverters, LFOs and VCAs.
  
  
• Delay lines workshop is about creating time-based effects: delay, reverb, vibrato and chorus. As the foundation it uses a PT2399-based delay line, but the principles apply to any other digital or analog device.