alt Hacker NewsThis is great. One of my goals is "create my own ESP32 PCB" however I am lacking the knowledge to do so. I was hoping to get some help by an LLM but people here said it's not that great in PCB layout. Still I will try Kicad with MCP :)
Sure I am willing to learn but I need a more efficient path than a complete EE degree. I guess you can get quite far with a reference design but I understood that there's a lot to learn about ground layers, trace widths and so on.
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A substantial portion of the things you need to know about layout are summarised quite nicely in the 4 YouTube videos in a previous comment of mine
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549063
Note that the audio in the first video doesn't start until 40 seconds in.
One thing I learned the hard way is the antenna must not lie on your PCB! Even if it's just board without copper. I didn't see this stated anywhere, but once you look, every devkit is doing that, the antenna sticks over the PCB. When I had it on the PCB I had very bad connectivity and very high power usage.
I have built one PCB with esp32-s3-wroom-1. Usb line is working and I can program the mcu module. However I could not make the ip5306 auto start on battery yet. And I am still unable to get audio from pcm5102a + pam8403 pipeline.
What I have well learned is It's a hard, time consuming and relatively expensive hobby.
Perhaps we could help each other?
I haven't made a ESP32 design, but I recently learnt KiCad and PCB design enough to do a RP235x board with a non-reference design choice (1.8v VDDIO). I only used the official hardware guide + LLMs for questions, and had it work on the first try - it wasn't too hard!