Electronic Circuit PCB Layouting: A step by step process in designing a printed circuit board layout before etching process takes place using FRITZING SOFTWARE

What Will I Learn?

At the end of this tutorial:
The readers will be able to know how to properly design a circuit layout on a PCB before etching for actual layout. PCB designing is important to any electronic projects to lessen cost and make it more presentable.

Introduction

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Printed Circuit Board is an electronic material that mechanically supports and electrically connects electronic components using conductive tracks, pads and other features etched from one or more sheet layers of copper laminated onto and/or between sheet layers of a non-conductive substrate.

To know more about PCB just go to this link

Etching is the process of using strong acid (ferric chloride) to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in scratch in the metal.

Know more about etching

Requirements

Software
♦ Fritzing application

Difficulty

♦ Basic

Tutorial Contents

Using the fritzing software, we will design a PCB circuit layout.
Part I. Schematic Diagram
So first let us assume we already made our circuit diagram. For this tutorial, I will use a sample of the circuit power transistor.

Part II. PCB
Click on the PCB. It will display like this below.

In connecting the circuit in the PCB you can choose either manual connection or automatic routing connection.

In manual connection you will connect each pin manually by clicking the pin & drag and connect to the other pin.

In automatic connection, you will just click on autoroute to automatically connect the circuit base from the circuit diagram.

After that, you can design your pcb by dragging the connection according to your desired design. For this tutorial, this my sample design.

Part III. Export for Actual PCB layout
In this part of my tutorial, this is the time we will finalize our circuit design in the actual PCB. So the design must be converted into a pdf file to be printed and etched to the actual PCB.
Just click on the export for pcb button

Select a folder to save your PCB layout in PDF form.

It will start exporting your layout

When it’s done, go to the folder where it was saved.

Click on it to open and it will look like this.

Now this is the final part of PCB designing ready to be etch in the actual PCB.