I had such good luck last time with my anemometer retrofit PCB with JLCPCB so this time I sent off another order for a small PCB using Kicad 7. I say “good luck” because I acknowledge that I AM a complete noob with Kicad and EDA in general, but I was delighted that my “engineering skills” were good enough that the mounting hole spacing for my MetOne anemometer retrofit was spot on to fit the existing housing. This was in large part to the help I got on the Kicad forum. But unfortunately, I chose to upgrade to Kicad 7 in the middle of the project I was working on…libraries were sort of messed up (my fault, I’m sure) and it took a while to get that semi-fixed and working. I was getting lots of warnings when I ran DRC (Design Rules Checker) like “footprint doesn’t match same in xxxx library”, and “courtyard infractions”, but since they were just warnings, I sent it off anyway to be processed. The design is based on the Dallas DS2423 1-Wire counter/memory, which is now unfortunately obsolete. Total bummer, because it’s perfect to use a 1-wire device for a remote rain gauge which can be, like, 30 feet or more from the main board. I figured, what the heck; for $4 for 5 PCB’s including shipping, I used the DS2423 and some BAT54S Schottky diodes that I had on hand.
I still haven’t soldered the tiny SMT devices to the FIRST board yet! Have to do that soon. Now back to VSCode and PlatformIO to get the main board firmware working…
Wow…I was spending a lot of time with Kicad 7, but, hey, I was having fun. Kicad is amazing. And the board looks pretty nice if I do say so myself; not bad for a EDA noob! And not bad: 5 boards for $2 and $2 for shipping by postal service and handling! BTW, the text you see under the battery holder is a place that JLCPCB can put a tracking number for fabrication. Since you can choose the location for the number I thought why not under the holder? Hopefully, that worked – I failed to apparently stipulate a location for my first PCB with them. And apparently there were no issues during fabrication, since my 5 new PCB’s were just shipped out…yay!