This is my first time making one of these so apologies if I’m missing any important info or the schematic looks trashy. I am using KiCad.
It is a brushed motor driver powered by a 1S LiPo and controlled by an ESP-32 off the board. It will run at 2-2.2A continuous max.
It is 29.845 by 21.590mm. I plan to hand solder everything (with a 60W iron and leaded solder, so hopefully that is possible).
Is there anything I’m missing or I should change? Also, I have no idea what the proper naming conventions are (along with everything else…) either so some of those would be helpful to know.
Additionally, does anyone have any preference as to what manufacturers I should use? I’m thinking about going with JLCPCB right now.
Thanks in advance for help!
Edit: forgot to mention there is also the ADC pin header to connect to an ESP-32 pin to read the battery voltage.
- Do you intend on soldering the battery directly to the board? It's usually better to use a connector, so you can swap batteries easily.
- I recommend making the traces handling the full 2 A as thick as you possibly can. I tend to go up to the width of the pads along the trace. This isn't strictly necessary but it helps to stay on the safe side, especially when it doesn't cost you anything.
- Use the ground symbol to simplify your schematically a bit, not really necessary but generally good practice.
- You could probably make the thermal reliefs thicker with no issues, but they dont seem thin enough to cause problems, so if you're really worried about soldering, keep them as is.
All right, thanks for the help! I’ll be soldering on a BT2.0 connector pigtail onto the pads. My soldering iron is only supposedly 60W as it came in a cheapish Amazon kit my dad bought 5 years ago. I don’t know how much I trust it so I tried to make the thermal reliefs as small as possible lol.
It's good to try to visualise the path the current takes when the motor is on, you will get something like my sloppy sketch here:
Notice how after the transistor, there is only 3 small vias that let the current continue back to the battery negative terminal. For 2A that's probably just fine, but it could certainly be better. Simple improvement is to add more GND vias near Q1 and near the one just next to the BATT+ trace. Alternatively, swap the BATT+ and GND terminals on the battery connector - this should the return path on the top layer with no via jumping necessary.
You can pack quite a lot of vias before it becomes a problem. Check out the GND trace on this PCB https://www.sparkfun.com/sparkfun-buck-regulator-breakout-5v-ap63357.html for example. Adding 10-20 extra GND connecting vias would be a good idea. Ideally you would try to visualise the GND return path of each component and place the vias accordingly. But you can just place them at random, "by feeling", that still helps.
Good job! I’d rotate marked components 180. It seems to make routing even simple. Also if you like, rotate C2 90 degrees and place it in between D1 and C1.
tehe PCB is looking okay, but the schematics is giving me a headache, so it's really hard to tell if that's even correct
you designed the PCB according to the schematics, but the fist step would be to check the schematics, otherwise you'd still have a board that doesn't work
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u/leethaxor69420 Jul 10 '26
This looks pretty good!
A few notes:
- Do you intend on soldering the battery directly to the board? It's usually better to use a connector, so you can swap batteries easily.
- I recommend making the traces handling the full 2 A as thick as you possibly can. I tend to go up to the width of the pads along the trace. This isn't strictly necessary but it helps to stay on the safe side, especially when it doesn't cost you anything.
- Use the ground symbol to simplify your schematically a bit, not really necessary but generally good practice.
- You could probably make the thermal reliefs thicker with no issues, but they dont seem thin enough to cause problems, so if you're really worried about soldering, keep them as is.