hckrnws

I don't like this tutorial. It purports to teach you "what everything on the PCB fundamentally does, and what every single component on your PCB is actually for!" but it gets the reasoning for a lot of stuff wrong, sometimes badly wrong. I think every single instance of a component with a numerical value picks the value with a misleading or even completely wrong justification. Even if the tutorial gets to an OK schematic in the end, it shouldn't be teaching shoddy reasoning.

(And the author doesn't seem to understand decoupling capacitors, but most people don't understand decoupling capacitors, including most datasheet authors, so that doesn't surprise me.)

Also, KiCad's "solutions" for BOMs are hilariously, absurdly terrible. But that helps me earn a living, so I can't complain too much....

Do you have a tutorial that you like?

I thought this article would first start with the most essential question: "How to decide what you need on your devboard".

Without that critical piece of design work, you may as well call this "How to build a Raspberry Pi Nano from scratch". Which, to be fair, is also a good article to write.

But step 1 for really building a dev board is answering the question, "What do I need from this that I can't get from a $5 Amazon purchase?"

> What do I need from this that I can't get from a $5 Amazon purchase?

A month of enjoyment tinkering on a hobby just for the hell of it.

This is a really excellent tutorial, thank you for making it.

Honestly my problem is that all my designs turn into devboards since I always have a kind of "FOMO" of not breaking something out and then needing it later to bodge things... and then I'm left with a crowded board where I don't even use two thirds of things...

I‘m sure you've already considered that, but what about iterating your design, e.g. redesigning the board if you need more outputs?

Crosspost to r/embedded if you haven’t. See you there.