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Designing Electronic Circuits

 

One of my hobbies, in and out of any of my jobs, has been, is and will be the electronics. I have designed many circuits, I have made some of them at home and others I have ordered to a PCB manufacturer.

 

Below you can find the main steps to design a circuit, later, I'm going update the WEB site in order have a good manual of how to do it. For further information you can email me.

The Program

I use to use the Proteus, a program that have two parts, one (IRIS) where you draw the scheme of the circuit. The second part (ARES) design the PCB. There are many other option, but for me, Proteus is just what I need, a very powerful and easy program to design and very important, to simulate..

The PCB

The PCB should be easy for your first tries, just try the automatic way, place and route. For more complex circuits you also should follow some rules:

  • Size the plate and place the mounting holes.

  • Place the main components where you think they should be, like the microprocesor, connectors,...

  • If your PCB has a lot of tracks you can use different size of pads for each layer.

  • Do not forget to enlarge the tracks that are going to carry more power.

 

The Scheme

We will start to suppose that you know how to draw a circuit, but to design it in Proteus you should have some clues you should follow all the time for improve the efficient of your time.

  • Firstly, think the size of the components, if you are a bit slick I recommend you SMD size for each IC and for resistors and capacitors, 1206 size, is very common and not very difficult to solder it.

  • Write the reference of the component of your usual provider in the Proteus component field.

  • If Proteus let you, simulate the circuit before send to manufacture.

The Result

There are a lot of PCB manufacturer but the one that I have used in the past are:

 

In future updates I will attach photos and schemes of my projects.

 

 

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