[0:00] If you’ve watched some of my earlier videos you’ll know that I used to use EasyEDA for my PCB designs.
[0:06] Now one of the things I liked about EasyEDA is it has a very tight integration with LCSC
[0:11] parts and that gives you symbols, footprints and 3D models. So I’ve got this very simple
[0:16] schematic here. I’ve not wired up any of the pins it’s just for a demo but we have our symbols here
[0:22] and if we switch over to the PCB you can see we’ve got the footprints all set up
[0:26] and we can go to the 3D view and we have a really nice 3D view of what our PCB is going to look like.
[0:32] Now one of the downsides of EasyEDA is there’s no way to export this so you can’t load it into
[0:38] your CAD program to build an enclosure for your PCB. So I switched over to KiCad because KiCad
[0:45] lets you export 3D models it’s really nice. Now the only thing is KiCad does have a very rich
[0:50] library of components but it doesn’t have everything so you’re often left searching the
[0:56] internet trying to find components and trying to find footprints and 3D models to match.
[1:01] I found a really handy tool. What we can do is we can take the ids of our LCSC components
[1:09] so we just go here grab the supplier part or you can go to the LCSC website
[1:14] and search for your component.
[1:20] So let’s find an ESP32. We can just grab this component part and you’ll see it’s got an EasyEDA
[1:28] model. So what we can do is we can copy this and then we can paste it into this nice little script.
[1:34] So I pulled out some LCSC components here so let’s just run this
[1:37] and this goes off to LCSC. It downloads the symbols, it downloads the footprint and if
[1:46] there’s a 3D model available it downloads that as well and then it adds it into KiCad.
[1:50] So now if we go into KiCad we can add some components. So you can see here I’ve got an EasyEDA
[1:56] to KiCad library and it’s pulled in various components. So here’s the FPC connector,
[2:02] let’s add that to our design. Here’s a ESP32 room module so we’ll add that as well
[2:13] and here’s our nice little USB connector so let’s add that so I think it was this one.
[2:19] So there’s our footprint and there’s our symbol so we’ll add that as well.
[2:24] So all three of these symbols were pulled down from the LCSC parts catalog.
[2:30] Now if we go to our PCB we can update our PCB.
[2:42] So there’s our components with their footprints.
[2:45] So now we’ll just do an edge cut and we’ll just put a box around this
[2:49] and now we can go to the 3D viewer and there’s our components. Now of course there is a slight thing
[2:58] where some of the 3D components don’t quite match up to the footprints
[3:02] but that’s easy enough to fix so let me just quickly show you how to do that.
[3:06] So we open up the footprint editor go to the 3D model just need to position this so we can see it
[3:14] and now we can adjust this model so that it’s correct. So I think it needs to be rotated
[3:21] by 180 degrees and it needs to move up so there’s our component so actually it was rotated correctly
[3:29] it was just offset slightly incorrectly so let’s move it into the right place.
[3:35] So there we go that’s our component nicely positioned and we can do the same for the USB
[3:41] connector so that was slightly going through the PCB. So you can see if we look here it’s pushed
[3:49] far too far down so we can just push that up so we need to adjust the Y so let’s adjust the Z
[3:59] the wrong way push that up so that looks about right to me.
[4:08] Hit OK and now we go to our 3D viewer and you can see it’s all perfectly set up now.
[4:17] Now there is one thing to be aware of when you export your 3D model
[4:25] you need to export as VRML otherwise you won’t get most of your components.
[4:30] The best tool for reviewing this I found is FreeCAD so this is a nice piece of FreeCAD software
[4:36] and here’s our PCB in all its glory with the components and all the lovely colors
[4:41] so that’s pretty neat. Now on the subject of PCBs you really should take a look at PCBWay
[4:47] I’ve been using them for all my PCBs but they also do 3D printing and CNC work so it’s pretty
[4:53] interesting I’ve got a whole bunch of orders with them right now and I’m waiting for some delivery
[4:57] so we can see all of my orders here I’ve got some that are waiting for delivery some that are in
[5:02] production and quite a few completed ones so have a look at PCBWay for your PCB needs.
[5:08] So what about importing into Fusion 360 we can’t import the world file directly but what we can do
[5:17] is load it into Blender so if you’ve not used Blender before it can be slightly confusing
[5:22] it starts off with a cube in your display now we can just select everything and then push x and
[5:28] delete so you select everything by pushing a and then you push x and that deletes everything and
[5:34] now we can import our world file so we go here and we import a x3d extensible 3d so if I go to my
[5:45] folder I have my little demo so I can import that it comes in quite big so we can zoom out and here’s
[5:54] our here’s our PCB so it comes in and Blender displays it now what we can do is we can export
[6:02] this as a wavefront opt file so we go to export and we choose wavefront and we choose obj now
[6:10] there’s a couple of options here that can be quite useful so we want to include colors and it’s quite
[6:15] useful to group by object groups so let’s put that into our same folder and now if we go over to
[6:25] Fusion 360 we can do insert insert mesh and now if we select from our computer you can see that
[6:34] I have a untitled.obj and an untitled.mtl so if we open this file you can see that our PCB has been
[6:46] imported so there you go now the only downside with this is it does import it as a mesh so you
[6:52] can see all these lines here that’s all the mesh lines but it’s good enough and it does match the
[6:58] sizes of our PCB so if we inspect we can measure from that corner to that corner and we can see
[7:06] that that is 36.4 millimeters now if we look at our PCB in KiCad and we measure it here
[7:15] you can see that that is 36.4 millimeters now the only thing to make sure of is when you do your
[7:26] file export you need to make sure you choose millimeters as your units for the output files
[7:34] but it works pretty well so that’s quite good so the tool is pretty easy to use there’s a really
[7:41] nice github readme file with all the instructions it gets you set up and you get a nice KiCad library
[7:47] and this imports the symbols footprints and 3d models straight into it now of course there is
[7:52] a warning you can’t really trust all the footprints you download off the internet so make sure you
[7:56] double check them against the datasheet you don’t want to mess your PCB up so it’s a pretty good
[8:02] tool give it a go and let me know what you think i’ll see you in the next video