KiCad — Practice Schedule¶

PCB design is project-paced, not hour-paced. Unlike Blender or piano, you can't make incremental progress on a board for 15 minutes and feel it — boards are integration projects where the value lands at the end. So the schedule below is structured around finishing small things on a regular cadence.

Daily (10–20 min) — pick one¶

• Watch one Phil's Lab or Robert Feranec video at 1.25× speed.
• Read one section of the Usage page and try the shortcuts in a sandbox project.
• Open a finished board (yours or an open-source one) and trace one signal from schematic to board on paper.
• Read one page of an IC datasheet; identify the recommended land pattern and decoupling.
• Anki: 5 min on schematic and PCB shortcuts.

Weekly (2–3 hours) — pick one¶

• Make progress on the current Tutorial level.
• Recreate a circuit from a YouTube video as a schematic; ERC clean.
• Browse one open-source hardware project on GitHub or LCSC EasyEDA Open Source; read the schematic and identify three design choices.
• Write a custom symbol + footprint for a part you might use later.
• Run DRC on an old project, fix everything, and re-export.

Monthly — order a board¶

This is the keystone. Every month, send Gerbers somewhere — even if the board is silly. The constraints are:

• DRC clean, no warnings.
• Silkscreen has the date and your initials.
• You can name every footprint and explain why you chose it.
• You documented the project in a one-paragraph README in the project folder.

Cost is ~$5–15 + shipping at JLCPCB or PCBWay. Two weeks delivery time = a deadline.

Quarterly — assemble a board¶

Get one board to actually power on. Solder it yourself or pay for assembly. Take a photo. The first time a board powers up correctly is the moment electronics goes from "interesting" to "addictive."

Anti-pattern checklist¶

Don't do these:

• Spend > 1 week on a single Tutorial level. Order what you have, iterate next round.
• Optimize a board for fabrication you'll never order. The point of the constraints is the order.
• Switch design tools every two weeks. KiCad is sufficient for ~99% of hobby and small-product work.
• Watch tutorials without opening KiCad. Passive learning here is especially low-value.

Tracking¶

Keep a boards.md in your projects folder with one line per board:

2026-01  blink              5×  trivial, all worked
2026-02  attiny-board       5×  USB-C polarity wrong, fixed in rev2
2026-03  mic-preamp         5×  picked up clock noise, learned the lesson
2026-04  rp2040-dev         5×  worked first try, kept on desk for a year

The list is the metric, not the hours.