Volume 1 of KiCad Like a Pro, 5th edition is finished. All eleven chapters are drafted, they are online, and if you already bought into the beta they are waiting in your account right now. Volume 2 is where I am writing today.
This is the first of four volumes, the one that takes a reader with no PCB experience to a board they can hold in their hand. The whole edition is a ground-up rewrite for KiCad 10, so every screenshot and every keystroke matches the version you are running today.
What’s in Volume 1
By the end of Volume 1 you will have taken two real circuits from a blank schematic sheet to manufactured, physical boards. The first is a breadboard power supply, a compact board that takes a standard 9 V wall adapter and delivers regulated 5 V and 3.3 V rails to your breadboard. The second is a tiny solar power supply, a little more involved in both the schematic and the layout, which gives you practice with the choices you face every time you sit down to design something new.
Neither project assumes you have done this before, in PCB design or in KiCad. You need a computer, an
internet connection, a mouse with a scroll wheel, and patience. No test equipment, no special hardware.
More important than the boards are the two workflows they teach: an 8-step schematic design workflow
and an 8-step layout design workflow, the same ones I use for every board I design. The projects come
and go but the workflows are what you keep.
The volume runs roughly half concepts and half hands-on work. The first five chapters lay the foundation: what a PCB is, how to read a schematic, how to read a layout, the concepts underneath both, and the workflows themselves. Then four chapters walk you through the projects, click by click. Chapter 10 covers getting your finished board manufactured, including the Gerbers and the bill of materials a factory needs from you. Chapter 11 collects recipes for the small tasks you will return to constantly, and a Mini Encyclopedia at the back handles the looking-up.
Why I am selling the book before it is done
A book like this takes months to write properly. Rather than disappear for a year and hand you a finished object, I decided to follow something closer to a Kickstarter model and release the book as I write it. You get each volume as it is drafted, you watch the thing take shape, and you get a say in what is working and what is not. Your support funds the writing, and your feedback makes the result better than it would have been.
The trade is that you are reading a book in motion. Chapters get rewritten, sections move, and a paragraph you read in August may look different in October, usually because a reader told me it was not clear enough. So I am transparent about which parts are settled and which are not. Everything still being written carries a small marker, and you see it before you open the chapter.
What’s in Volume 2
Here is the way I think about the boundary between the first two volumes. Volume 1 makes you a competent user of other people’s parts and rules. Volume 2 makes you self-sufficient.
That means three things in practice. You will author your own parts, the symbols and footprints no library has drawn for you. You will 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 will take an original design, one that is yours rather than a follow-along, from a blank project all the way to the files a manufacturer needs.
I have planned to write ten chapters in Volume 2. The first six cover custom symbols, custom footprints, board setup, copper zones and fills, the bill of materials in depth, and design for manufacturing. Those have full drafts online now. So does the recipes chapter at the end, which has grown into the largest chapter in the volume.
The projects are the part I am building next. There is a warm-up, a 4×8×8 LED matrix array, a board with a lot of parts and most of them identical, which teaches you to work at scale and reuse your layout instead of repeating it. Then comes the capstone, a small dual H-bridge motor driver built around the DRV8833, an original board that pulls every headline skill in the volume into the open at once. It opens into an optional extension, a four-motor board built from a second DRV8833, where the reuse habit from the warm-up pays off again.
I have done detailed planning for Volumes 3 and 4 but not started work yet. The third takes on multi-sheet and four-layer design, managing projects under Git version control, and extending KiCad with simulation, scripting, and autorouting. Then the fourth turns to high-speed design: controlled impedance, stack-up, length and skew tuning, and how to verify the result.
The part I am most pleased with
In every previous edition of KiCad Like a Pro, I faced the same problem: KiCad keeps improving, and a book slowly falls behind until a new edition is the only fix. I have designed the 5th edition is built to solve this problem.
Every figure carries an invisible stamp recording the KiCad version I captured it against, the version I last verified against (so I know it’s still valid), and which part of the interface it shows. When KiCad 11 arrives, I run a scan and get back an exact list of the figures and passages that release affects. Updating the book becomes a focused job instead of a rewrite, and those updates reach you at no extra cost, for the life of the 5th edition.
The price just went up, and it will go up again
One purchase covers the whole series: Volume 1 now, Volumes 2, 3, and 4 as I complete them, plus every revision and correction along the way. There is no video course yet, and I will not sell one until there is real video to deliver.
The price rises each time a volume is finished, because the book is worth more when it is more complete. It started at €20. With Volume 1 done, it is €30 today, and it will keep stepping up toward €50 when all four volumes are complete. Once you buy, your price is locked. I will never ask you for the difference, however much the book grows from here.
Early adopters also get access to the book’s community space at the Community Tier level, and you keep that access for good, even after the book is fully published.
If you have been waiting to see whether this edition was real before committing, Volume 1 is your answer. Head over to techexplorations.com/kicad to read more about the book, see exactly where each volume stands, and take the early-adopter price while it is still €30. I will see you inside, and I would genuinely like to hear what you think of Volume 1.