Designing and assembling my first PCB
A software developer documents their transition from high-level coding to hardware engineering by designing a custom PCB for a BME280 sensor. The author details the process of moving from prototyping with breadboards to creating a production-ready circuit board.
Why it matters
It demonstrates the accessibility of hardware design for software engineers and the iterative process of learning embedded systems.
About a couple months ago I purchased an Arduino Nano ESP32 dev board. I had this sudden itch and I wanted to play around with hardware. I don't really have much experience in this space, besides working on firmware for an IoT company over a decade ago, but I've written tons of software over the years. I was very surprised how quickly I was able to get the built-in LEDs to blink with Arduino IDE and some help from LLMs. After that I moved on to figure out how to build and flash firmware directly from the command line without having to deal with all these custom abstractions. I like operating from CLI. That was also somewhat easy and gave me confidence that I can go back to my normal tools (nvim) for working with code.
Technical documentation of a personal project with no political bias.
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