How a devboard works (and how to make your own)

[jmole]

I thought this article would first start with the most essential question: "How to decide what you need on your devboard".

Without that critical piece of design work, you may as well call this "How to build a Raspberry Pi Nano from scratch". Which, to be fair, is also a good article to write.

But step 1 for really building a dev board is answering the question, "What do I need from this that I can't get from a $5 Amazon purchase?"

[brailsafe]

> What do I need from this that I can't get from a $5 Amazon purchase?

A month of enjoyment tinkering on a hobby just for the hell of it.

[madaxe_again]

I just go the other way - dev boards are so cheap you can just take a scalpel to them and take off the bits you don’t want.

[kaipereira]

Hey guys, thanks for all the love :D

The website went down because of the traffic and large images, so I've temporarily switched hosting, and it should stay up now (DNS propagation might take a bit though), but I'm going to get those images smaller ASAP, thanks to everyone who posted web archives!

I'm also going to alter some of the reasoning for some of the stuff like decoupling capacitors, but the guide is still meant for complete beginners, and lots of the terminology/reasoning can be pretty overwhelming, and I still have a lot to learn about decoupling/other stuff!

I'll also add a part about what you actually need on your devboard, that's a great suggestion!

You can find a JOURNAL.md in EVERY SINGLE one of my hardware projects https://github.com/KaiPereira?tab=repositories so if you guys want to see more guides/tutorials, let me know :D

[wayvey]

While the deployment is down you can read it on web.archive.org https://web.archive.org/web/20251107235749/https://kaipereir...

[barishnamazov]

Not sure if it was due to higher load from HN or my IP location, but your website is inaccessible to me right now: "This deployment is temporarily paused."

[h1fra]

If I had to guess, it's because it's loading a bajillion images that are not compressed

[LaFolle]

For me also it is unreachable

"This deployment is temporarily paused"

[exmadscientist]

I don't like this tutorial. It purports to teach you "what everything on the PCB fundamentally does, and what every single component on your PCB is actually for!" but it gets the reasoning for a lot of stuff wrong, sometimes badly wrong. I think every single instance of a component with a numerical value picks the value with a misleading or even completely wrong justification. Even if the tutorial gets to an OK schematic in the end, it shouldn't be teaching shoddy reasoning.

(And the author doesn't seem to understand decoupling capacitors, but most people don't understand decoupling capacitors, including most datasheet authors, so that doesn't surprise me.)

Also, KiCad's "solutions" for BOMs are hilariously, absurdly terrible. But that helps me earn a living, so I can't complain too much....

[randmeerkat]

Do you have a tutorial that you like?

[numpad0]

This reads like the author just wanted to format his ChatGPT-aided build record in a lecture manual format, rather than being an attempt at such material.

[_def]

What do people often get wrong about decoupling capacitors?

[althaine]

Can you clarify the issues with KiCad's BOM flow?

[avipars]

This deployment is temporarily paused

Any archived version?

[St_Alfonzo]

https://web.archive.org/web/20251108052512/https://kaipereir...

[moi2388]

“ This is how are schematic will look when done the tutorial”

Well, that bodes well for the rest of the article..

[hackingonempty]

This is a really excellent tutorial, thank you for making it.

[matt3210]

Dang, I wanna read this but the site seems down

[Tharre]

https://web.archive.org/web/20251107235749/https://kaipereir...

[eqvinox]

Honestly my problem is that all my designs turn into devboards since I always have a kind of "FOMO" of not breaking something out and then needing it later to bodge things... and then I'm left with a crowded board where I don't even use two thirds of things...

[MrGilbert]

I‘m sure you've already considered that, but what about iterating your design, e.g. redesigning the board if you need more outputs?

[sweetjuly]

Test pads are great for these anxious breakouts. I usually drop tons and tons of test pads on the back of my boards as it's a very dense and unobtrusive way to expose traces that you probably don't need.

[massifist]

I found this article very informative. Thanks for writing it.

[neuvarius]

Crosspost to r/embedded if you haven’t. See you there.