Comment by ofrzeta

7 hours ago

This 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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ofrzeta

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nchie  30 minutes ago

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!

maufl  1 hour ago

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.