Using EasyEDA to design and build a PCB (Printed Circuit Board)

In this article we talk about using EasyEDA to design and fabricate a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) with both through hole and surface mount components.

As part of the “Design a New Drone” series, we created our own Power Distribution Board (PDB).

Designing a new Drone - Part 2

This takes the LiPo battery voltage and distributes it to the Electronic Speed Controllers (ESC’s) which drive the brushless motors. In addition, it provides a 5 VDC bus which we can connect to via the JST connectors. The Flight Controller, GPS and radio transceiver all require 5V.

Figure 1. ST eDesign Suite.

There are a few lessons that we learned along the way which we thought might be worth capturing. By lessons I am referring to mistakes! Making mistakes is part of learning but you don’t want to have to learn something twice.

Design Requirements

As a recap, for our PDB, we wanted to include:

1. The ability to connect without soldering (e.g. XT60 socket for LiPo connection, 2 pin JST SH sockets on the 5 VDC output for…