Open Source Wireless Environmental Sensor HW, Part 4: Schematics, PCB and PCBA
- Part 1: Introduction and Requirements
- Part 2: Prototyping
- Part 3: Design
- Part 4: Schematics, PCB and PCBA
- Part 5: Production
- Part 6: Testing the prototypes
In our previous articles (links can be found above) we introduced our wireless environmental sensor project; which is a rechargeable battery-operated wireless sensor that can measure:
- Temperature with ±1.0°C accuracy
- Barometric pressure with 1 hPa absolute accuracy
- Humidity with ±3% accuracy
This article will cover the Schematics, PCB and PCBA phase of the project. In our previous article, we finalized the design and created all the input a hardware engineer will need to do their work. We specified that we want to use KiCAD as our EDA software, we created our GPIO mapping, we introduced some rules and guidelines for our schematics, we created a components placement proposal and decided on the size of the PCB.
KiCAD files source files
All the KiCAD files are published here.
Credits schematics
Creating the draft schematics was a real team effort; I will thank you in alphabetic order.
Alfred, thank you for reviewing the schematics and discussing the pro and cons with the different solutions. In the end, we chose to be bold 😃
Ke and friend, thank you for reviewing the schematics and suggesting all the improvements that were implemented. Your contribution was awesome; I am so grateful! 🙏
Mattias, thank you for reviewing the schematics and sharing your knowledge. Hopefully, we will implement the reaming suggestions in a feature revision. Thank you for all the encouragement.
Tze-long, thank you for fixing the rookie mistakes in the design and also the brilliant suggestions on the placement and size of the components.
Credits schematics, layout, production files
Our KiCAD hero has been Johan Westlund, you can find him here. Johan took our draft schematics and turned them into usable schematics. He also simplified the design (i.e. reduced the risk) and made everything fit into the enclosure.
Thank you for reading! Take care and hope to see you soon. 🙏🏽
This article is a living document please reach out to me if you want to contribute or see anything inaccurate here. This article is part of our “Boosting Innovation” project.
