Volume 2 of KiCad Like a Pro, 5th edition is finished. All eleven chapters are written, they are online, and if you have already bought into the beta they are in your account right now, ready to read.
If this is the first you are hearing of the 5th edition, here is the short version. It is a ground-up rewrite of KiCad Like a Pro, entirely based on KiCad 10, published in four volumes, each one a competency you can actually finish. Volume 1 takes you to your first manufactured board, Volume 2 makes you self-sufficient, Volume 3 covers advanced design and extending KiCad, and Volume 4 takes on high-speed work. One purchase covers all four, and I release each volume as I write it rather than disappearing for two years and handing you a finished book.
Volume 1, in a paragraph
In Volume 1 I assume nothing about your knowledge of KiCad or PCB design.
The Volume starts with what a PCB is and ends with two boards you have designed and sent to a factory. The deliverable is a breadboard power supply that turns a 9 V adapter into clean 5 V and 3.3 V rails, and a slightly harder tiny solar power supply.
Along the way you learn the two workflows I use for every board I design, an 8-step schematic pass and an 8-step layout pass. I completed these eleven chapters, in July.
What Volume 2 is about
While Volume 1 makes you a competent user of other people’s parts and rules. Volume 2 makes you self-sufficient. This means three things in practice.
- You author your own symbols and footprints when no library has drawn them for you.
- You set up a board with rules that match the current it carries and the factory that will build it, instead of accepting whatever a new project opens with.
- And you take an original design, one that is yours rather than a follow-along, from a blank project to the files a manufacturer needs.
Six chapters cover the skills: custom symbols, custom footprints, board setup that matters, copper zones and fills, the bill of materials in depth, and design for manufacturing. Then the projects arrive, and they take up most of the volume.
The warm-up is a 4×8×8 LED matrix array, 256 LEDs driven by four MAX7219s, which is really one cell drawn four times. You capture that cell as a design block, stamp out the other three, then place and route one of them and let KiCad copy the work onto the rest.
The capstone is a dual H-bridge motor driver built around the DRV8833. It has sixteen components, one schematic sheet, two layers, and an original board. I chose a chip in an HTSSOP package with an exposed thermal pad on purpose. It forces a custom footprint, because I would not trust a library footprint I had not drawn myself for a part like that, it forces real net classes, because the motor nets need wide copper while the logic nets do not, and it forces a decision about solder paste that a simpler board would let you avoid.
Two decisions I made along the way
The first was to let the six skill chapters practise on a simple stand-in board rather than on the capstone itself. That way the symbol you draw in Chapter 1 and the footprint you draw in Chapter 2 are already in your personal library when the capstone calls for them, and Chapter 8 becomes a review of skills you have rather than a pile of new ones.
The second was the balance. Volume 1 was roughly half concepts and half hands-on work; Volume 2 is about 70 percent project work, because producing a board, as opposed to following one, is a skill you only build by doing.
About the price
One purchase covers the whole series: Volumes 1 and 2 now, Volumes 3 and 4 as I finish them, and every revision along the way, including the updates that keep the book current as KiCad moves to version 11 and beyond. The price rises each time a volume is completed, because the book is worth more when there is more of it. It started at €20 and it ends at €50 when all four volumes are done. Volume 2 being finished triggers the next rise, so check the pricing page for today’s number before you decide. Whatever you pay is locked from the moment you buy, and I will never ask you for the difference.
Everything is at the dedicated KiCad Like a Pro website. Free excerpts from every chapter of both volumes, a live status page showing where each volume stands, and the current price. Read a chapter of Volume 2 before you buy anything, then tell me what you make of it.