I sure don’t need to introduce Arduino here, it had been in the hackerspace limelight for a long time now. If you ever noticed their hardware design at arduino.cc, all of them are designed in an excellent PCB design software – Eagle. Here at Numato, we had been pondering about drawing schematics and designing hardware with KiCad, another excellent CAD software out there. In fact we designed a few boards and they would arrive in store in a matter of days!
So why do we want to use KiCad after all? There is no short answer, we will write another post about it. Anyway, to learn and experiment with KiCad we chose “The most popular” open hardware design Arduino. Using their design as reference, we put together the schematic and board in KiCad from the scratch. Here is the 3D rendering of the board. As you may notice, some of the components don’t have 3D models available and aren’t populated on board. But still this image above gives a good idea about how the board looks like.