← Back to home

Project

PCB Evolution

Personal projects · Altium · Analog & digital

I started working on my own PCB designs when my seniors on the High Voltage team introduced me to Altium. I was inspired by the PreCharge board they were working on and wanted to get good at designing my own boards, so while I was taking Electronics 1 as a sophomore, I made my own design projects to learn alongside the class.

The first is a basic LED Chaser PCB. As you can tell, it's pretty rough around the edges.

LED Chaser PCB
LED Chaser: my first board.

The next board that I made was sightly better. It was a BJT Amplifier inspired from a design project that I did in my Electronics 1 class.

BJT Amplifier PCB
BJT Amplifier: a much cleaner layout.

After that I wanted something more a bit more challenging. The next two designs I made were microcontrollers. One ESP32 Wroom module and then a Texas Instruments MSPM0 Module. These projects really helped me get better at layout and visual aesthetic for my designs.

ESP32 Wroom Module
ESP32 Module: my first attempt at a slightly more detailed project. It was a board I designed to be used with a paper ink display.
Texas Instruments MSPM0 MCU
This board is where I got way better at figuring out a good layout and overall board aesthetic.

My most recent project is a carrier board for a CMOD A7. It really captures the growth of my circuit designs well.

SoundForge FPGA carrier board
SoundForge: my latest board, an FPGA audio carrier.

SoundForge grew into its own project — read more about it here →