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KiCad Tutorial for Beginners: From a Blank Project to a Manufacturable Board

KiCad is the open-source electronic design suite that has become the standard starting point for anyone learning printed circuit board design. It is free, it has no board-size or layer limits, and it carries a design all the way from schematic to the manufacturing files a board house needs. This tutorial walks through that complete flow with a first board in mind: creating a project, drawing the schematic, assigning footprints, laying out the board, checking it against design rules, and exporting the files for manufacture. It is written for someone who has never opened KiCad, but who understands basic circuits; if you need the circuit fundamentals first, start with our electronics circuits basics guide.

Before choosing parts for your board, read our guide to reading datasheets — the pinout, package and ratings you confirm there are exactly what KiCad needs from you. For the board itself, see PCB stackup design and PCB design with AI.

Step 1: set up the project properly

Everything in KiCad lives inside a project, and a project is a folder containing a set of files that describe the schematic, the board and their shared settings. Create a new project and give it a short, sensible name with no spaces — spaces in project and file names cause trouble with some manufacturing tools later. KiCad creates the project file, an empty schematic and an empty board, all linked together. Keep the project in its own folder, and keep everything belonging to the board inside that folder, including any custom symbols or footprints you create. A board whose files are scattered across a computer is a board that breaks when it is moved.

Before drawing anything, decide the board's basic parameters. How many layers will it have? A first board is usually two layers, which is cheaper and easier to lay out than four. What is the smallest track width and clearance your chosen manufacturer can produce at their standard price? Enter those numbers in the board setup as your design rules — KiCad will check your layout against them later, but only if you have told it what they are. Choosing the manufacturer first and designing to their capabilities, rather than designing freely and hoping a manufacturer can build it, is one of the habits that separates boards that get made from boards that get revised.

Step 2: draw the schematic

The schematic is the logical description of the circuit: which parts connect to which, with no concern yet for physical position. Open the schematic editor and place symbols for each part from KiCad's libraries. A symbol is the schematic representation of a component — its pins and its function — and it is distinct from the footprint, the physical pads the part will be soldered to. You will link the two later; at schematic stage, only the symbol matters.

Place the parts in a logical flow, usually with inputs on the left and outputs on the right, and power at the top and ground at the bottom. This is a convention, not a rule, but following it makes schematics readable by anyone else, including your future self. Connect the pins with wires, and use labels and power symbols to keep the drawing tidy: a net label lets two points connect without a wire drawn across the whole sheet, and power symbols for supply rails and ground keep the drawing free of long power wires. Give every part a unique reference designator — R1, R2, C1, U1 — and a value: a resistor needs its resistance, a capacitor its capacitance and voltage rating, an integrated circuit its exact part number. A schematic with unvalued parts is a wish list, not a design.

Two checks belong at schematic stage, before you touch the board. First, run the electrical rules check: KiCad will flag unconnected pins, pins connected to the wrong type of signal, and power pins with no supply. Not every warning is an error — some pins are intentionally unconnected — but every warning deserves a decision, not a shrug. Second, annotate the schematic so the reference designators are assigned in a clean order. A schematic that passes its electrical rules check with all parts valued and annotated is ready to become a board.

Step 3: assign footprints

Footprint assignment is the step beginners most often rush, and it is the step where the most expensive mistakes happen. A footprint is the physical pattern of copper pads, holes and outline that a part is soldered to, and it must match the exact package of the exact part you intend to buy. Open the footprint assignment tool and work through every part, checking the package name against the datasheet: a resistor in an 0805 package and the same resistor in a 0603 package have different footprints, and a board built with the wrong one cannot be assembled.

KiCad's libraries contain footprints for standard packages, and for a first board those are usually enough. But verify them: check the pad dimensions against the package drawing in the datasheet, check the pin-1 marker, and check the courtyard — the keep-out area around the part that prevents neighbouring parts from crowding it. If your part's package is not in the libraries, create the footprint yourself from the datasheet dimensions rather than forcing a near-enough footprint to fit. A footprint error discovered after manufacture costs a new board run; a footprint error discovered at assignment time costs five minutes.

Step 4: lay out the board

With footprints assigned, transfer the design to the board editor. KiCad imports the parts as footprints with ratsnest lines — thin lines showing which pads must connect, without yet showing how. The layout job is to turn those connections into copper tracks, and the order of work matters. First, place the parts: put connectors at the board edges where cables will reach them, put sensitive analogue parts away from noisy switching parts, keep short the tracks that carry fast signals or large currents, and leave room around parts that need heatsinking or that you will need to probe during testing. A good placement makes routing easy; a bad placement makes routing impossible, and no amount of clever track work rescues it.

Then route the tracks, starting with the critical nets: power, ground, high-current paths and fast signals. On a two-layer board, one layer often carries mostly horizontal tracks and the other mostly vertical, with vias — small plated holes — moving a track between layers where it must cross another. Keep tracks as short and direct as the placement allows, avoid sharp right angles, and keep clearances at or above the design rules you set at the start. Ground deserves special thought: on a simple two-layer board, a ground pour — a large copper area connected to ground — on one layer gives return currents a low-impedance path and improves both noise performance and manufacturability. Pour ground, but check that it does not create isolated copper islands or break the connections you need.

Finally, add the finishing details: a board outline on the edge-cuts layer, mounting holes where the board will be fixed, silkscreen labels for connectors and test points, and a title and revision on the silkscreen so the manufactured board can be identified. These details are small, but a board without an outline cannot be manufactured, and a board without labels is painful to assemble and test.

Step 5: check, then check again

Before generating any manufacturing files, run the design rules check. KiCad compares your layout against the rules you set — minimum track width, minimum clearance, drill sizes, unconnected nets — and reports every violation. Fix them all, or consciously waive the ones you understand and accept. Then run the electrical rules check on the schematic once more, in case anything changed during layout. Then, and this matters, inspect the board visually, layer by layer, at a comfortable zoom: look for tracks that pass too close to pads, for vias sitting on pads, for silkscreen text overlapping pads, and for anything that looks wrong even if the checker passed it. Automated checks catch rule violations; your eyes catch mistakes the rules never thought of.

The last check before manufacture is the Gerber review. Generate the Gerber files — the industry-standard files describing each layer of the board, plus the drill files — and open them in a Gerber viewer, which is a separate program from KiCad. The Gerbers are what the manufacturer will build from, not your KiCad screen, so inspect them as the manufacturer will see them: every copper layer, the solder mask, the silkscreen and the drills. Confirm the board outline is present, the drills line up with the pads, and nothing is mirrored. A surprising number of first boards fail at this step for a reason that was invisible in the editor, which is exactly why the step exists.

Step 6: send it for manufacture

When the Gerbers pass review, compress them into a single archive and upload them to your chosen manufacturer, along with the board specifications: layer count, board thickness, solder mask colour, surface finish and quantity. Most manufacturers run their own design-for-manufacture check and will flag problems before production, which is a useful second opinion but not a substitute for your own checks. While the boards are being made, order the parts: check each part number against the schematic, confirm the package matches the footprint you assigned, and order spares of the small cheap parts, because losing a resistor during assembly is a certainty, not a risk.

When the boards arrive, assemble one by hand or with the manufacturer's assembly service, then test it in stages: first check for shorts between power and ground before applying power, then power it with a current-limited supply, then test each functional block in turn. The first board rarely works perfectly, and that is normal. Record every fault, fix the design rather than the board wherever possible, and update the schematic and layout so the next revision carries the fix. That loop — design, check, build, test, record, revise — is the real skill of board design, and KiCad is simply the tool that makes it accessible.

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Complete the board-design cluster: reading datasheets for choosing parts, PCB stackup design for the layers your board is built from, and PCB design with AI for the wider workflow. The rest of this cluster covers loop diagrams explained. Then browse all guides for the wider LOTICI library.