The reason why I used a double LED symbol will be explained later. D1 represents THT FLEDs which will act as tentacles. Since my girlfriend likes to draw and paint and she is a big octopus and squid fan, I asked her to draw a few sketches for me. Nothing original, but originality is overrated. Maybe I could make a simple funny shaped PCB badge with a coin cell and some LEDs. My experience with KiCad was: open a project made by someone else, play with layer visibility and pretend I am trying to understand what’s going on, give up, export Gerber files and order PCBs and hope everything is correct.

That might be aĪ problem for someone but given the low amount of time I can invest into my projects and also the fact that I often order components on Aliexpress and I have to wait for those, the longer shipping times are not so big problem for me. The shipping time is not that bad - around 2 weeks for me. I realized it would make much more sense to quickly design a simple PCB and order it from China. I was also working on a third prototype for my room-conditions-monitor project (no blog post for this one yet, but there will be one soon) around that time and spent a few hours connecting components on a perfboard. I had no experience with PCBs and I had considered them to be a bit overkill for my projects.Īs I was ordering a fabrication of PCBs for my Corne Keyboard I realized how cheap manufacturing of a small set of boards is nowadays. Recently I realized I might give them some more interesting and fancy look in the form of a free-form sculpture or whatever you want to call those.

All my projects are on a breadboard and some of them are later transferred to a prototyping board (perfboard).

Octopus inkscape tutorial