u/Afraid-Ingenuity7338

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to create a demo board for an interactive session I am hosting about PCB Design and decided to use KiCAD for the first time to allow people to try doing their own versions for free (I'm still learning how to do the things I am used to doing in Cadence/Altium)

Aiming for as simple as possible, so no battery or power management, no uC (hence why I2C pins and FD are not used). The board will use energy harvesting when in range with a compatible device and light up an LED, then transfer info like linkedin/personal website etc over the NFC protocol.

As of now, I quickly designed a 2 layer card (0.8 mm thick) with rounded corners, used 0603 passives and the NT3H2111W0FTTJ as the NFC chip with TSSOP-8 package for hand soldering practice for people in a future session. Additionally, I am using a Class 5 NFC antenna that NXP has as a reference file in their Antenna Design guide zip file. I struggled with porting this into KiCAD as a footprint as the reference file came as an EAGLE pcb so I used AI to port over all the antenna coil tracks into a file that I could import into KiCAD as part of my footprint library.

These are some of my main concerns/questions:

1. Don't really trust the hacky AI process I used for the antenna coil footprint. I would love a doublecheck to see if there's anything that could have been messed up with the antenna footprint or better yet, a more foolproof way of getting the antenna coil as a footprint on its own.
2. Is using a solder mask text layer overlaid on the text on copper layer a good way to expose these properly?
3. Is there an easy way to port JLC PCB capabilities into KiCAD Design rules instead of tweaking values manually?
4. Is there enough clearance between the antenna coil and the GND planes?
5. If I plan to share this design and put it on Github for people to download, are there any good recommendations for how to apply the license?
6. I want people to be able to add cool designs on their cards (myself included) and ideally something not AI-generated. Are there free options for getting cool designs as SVGs that can be imported into KiCAD projects?
7. Any other things I may have missed?

Can also attach board files as needed. Thanks in advance!

Board Characteristics

Schematic

All Layers (white background)

Top Layers

Bottom Layers (flipped)

Front of card (3D render)

Back of Card (3D render) (flipped)

[EDITED]: realized schematic export showed up as black when reddit was in dark mode. Fixed now, along with other review request rules.

Also replaced layout images with white background images.

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to create a demo board for an interactive session I am hosting about PCB Design and decided to use KiCAD for the first time to allow people to try doing their own versions for free (I'm still learning how to do the things I am used to doing in Cadence/Altium)

Aiming for as simple as possible, so no battery or power management, no uC (hence why I2C pins and FD are not used). The board will use energy harvesting when in range with a compatible device and light up an LED, then transfer info like linkedin/personal website etc over the NFC protocol.

As of now, I quickly designed a 2 layer card (0.8 mm thick) with rounded corners, used 0603 passives and the NT3H2111W0FTTJ as the NFC chip with TSSOP-8 package for hand soldering practice for people in a future session. Additionally, I am using a Class 5 NFC antenna that NXP has as a reference file in their Antenna Design guide zip file. I struggled with porting this into KiCAD as a footprint as the reference file came as an EAGLE pcb so I used AI to port over all the antenna coil tracks into a file that I could import into KiCAD as part of my footprint library.

These are some of my main concerns/questions:

1. Don't really trust the hacky AI process I used for the antenna coil footprint. I would love a doublecheck to see if there's anything that could have been messed up with the antenna footprint or better yet, a more foolproof way of getting the antenna coil as a footprint on its own.
2. Is using a solder mask text layer overlaid on the text on copper layer a good way to expose these properly?
3. Is there an easy way to port JLC PCB capabilities into KiCAD Design rules instead of tweaking values manually?
4. Is there enough clearance between the antenna coil and the GND planes?
5. If I plan to share this design and put it on Github for people to download, are there any good recommendations for how to apply the license?
6. I want people to be able to add cool designs on their cards (myself included) and ideally something not AI-generated. Are there free options for getting cool designs as SVGs that can be imported into KiCAD projects?
7. Any other things I may have missed?

Can also attach board files as needed. Thanks in advance!

Board Characteristics

Schematic

All Layers (white background)

Top Layer

Bottom Layer (flipped)

Front of card 3D render

Back of card 3D render (flipped)