Mechanical Keyboard Business Card

I have built a lot of mechanical keyboards before, but this is the first time I designed a PCB from scratch. Before looking into it, making my own PCB sounded difficult and expensive, but it turns out it is neither.

To make a PCB, I first had to create the schematic. The schematic lists all components of the final product and how they are connected together.

Because all the complex logic is handled by the Pro Micro microcontroller. All I needed for the PCB is the pro micro itself and MX style switches.
In EasyEDA, to add a component to the schema you can either use the EELib tab to use common predefined components like Ground, VVC and resistors or use the Library to search for specific components.
For both the Pro Micro and the MX switches, there are user-contributed components in the library.

After placing the components I connected them with the wiring tools.
Using ports instead of connected wires can clean up the schematic.
Every connection with the same port will become connected.
In my case I used wires for the columns, and a port for the row.
I also added a ‘No Connect Flag’ to all pro micro pins I am not using. EasyEDA
can check that no connections are missed.

Once the schema was done and the rules were set up, I could start with the actual PCB.
PCBs can have all different kind of shapes and sizes. I went for the default business card size of 85mm x 55mm.
Laying out the PCB is very similar to the schema. Move the components in place and connect them with traces. Because had I already connected the components in the schematic, EasyEDA shows lines between things that need to be connected.
A rule of thumb when drawing the traces is to avoid right angles, they could cause reflection issues.

A PCB is basically a sandwich of multiple layers of copper. A simple
PCB has 2 copper layers. More complex boards can have many more.
To connect layers together, a small hole is drilled in the PCB. This is called
VIA. In my PCB I only used the top layer.

Because this is supposed to be a business card I also needed text.
On a PCB text is done with silk layers. It is possible to add text, shapes and even images.

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