← All tutorials

Designing a printed circuit board is where an idea stops being a schematic on a screen and becomes a physical thing you can hold, power up, and debug. It’s one of the most satisfying skills in hardware — and one where a hundred small decisions, most of them invisible on the finished board, decide whether it works on the first try or sends you back to the bench for a week.

This series is the guide I wish I’d had: not a click-by-click tour of one tool, but the reasoning behind each stage — what you’re actually deciding, why it matters, and how to make the call. I’ll use my own projects as running examples, but nothing here is tool-specific: the thinking is the same in Altium, KiCad, or anything else.

What “designing a PCB” really means

People often picture PCB design as the routing — the colourful maze of copper traces. That’s one step of many. Start to finish, a board goes through roughly this arc:

The mistake most beginners make is rushing to layout. The most experienced engineers spend a surprising amount of time on the schematic and the plan, because a clean, well-reasoned schematic makes layout almost mechanical — and a sloppy one makes it miserable.

The workflow this series follows

Here’s the roadmap. Each part builds on the last, in the order you’d actually do the work:

1. Introduction — you’re here. The big picture and the workflow.
2. Schematic capture — turning a design into a correct, readable schematic; symbols, nets, and the discipline that prevents 90% of later pain.
3. Component selection — choosing real parts from datasheets (and availability), not idealized ones.
4. Stackup & impedance — how many layers, what each one is for, and when controlled impedance matters.
5. Placement — the single highest-leverage layout step; getting this right makes routing easy.
6. Routing — traces, vias, widths, and the return-current thinking behind good routing.
7. Power & decoupling — delivering clean, stable power, which quietly determines whether everything else works.
8. Manufacturing & DFM — Gerbers, drill files, and designing so a fab can actually build it.

The tools you’ll need

You need one EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tool, and it matters less which than people think:

• KiCad — free, open-source, and now genuinely professional-grade. The best place to start.
• Altium Designer — the industry standard for professional work; powerful, with a price tag to match.

Both do the same fundamental things: draw a schematic, lay out a board, and export manufacturing files. Learn the concepts and you can move between tools in a weekend. I’ve shipped boards in both.

How to get the most out of this series

• Have a real project. Even a tiny one — a breakout board, a sensor board. Reading about PCB design without doing it is like reading about swimming.
• Understand the why before the how. When I explain a rule, I’ll explain the physics or the failure it prevents. Rules you understand are rules you can break intelligently.
• Expect to iterate. Nobody’s first board is perfect. Mine weren’t. The goal is a board that teaches you something, then a better one.

Next up: schematic capture — where every good board really begins.