I recently completed a projects that required a small number of PCBs with an AtTiny85 microcontroller. It was not worth getting boards made and time was short so I used  the old tried and tested stripboard. In the past I've never bothered to  layout the board on paper I just did it in my head. Invariably I made a lot of errors and also this board was a little more complicated.

Having finished the project I though I'd take some time to document how I set up KiCad to layout the stripboard.
KiCAD is an IDE for creating schematics and PCBs. I'm not going to discuss how to use KiCad other than the specific setup for setting out stripboards having already done the schematic, assigned footprints and imported the netlist into the PCB editor.
First open Preferences->General and disable "Enforce design rules when routing.

Next open Design Rules and set the default track width to 0.06, which is about the width of a stripboard track.
Next click the "Global Design Rules" tab. Add a custom track with of 0.02"
On closing the dialog you should see two track widths available in the top-left dropdown.

Set your grid to 0.1
Draw your board outline.
Lay out you main components on the grid.
Now add tracks and vias. Set bottom tracks be 60 mils. Start drawing. when you get to point when you need to jump tracks, press V then W to change apyer and track width. Draw in the jumper wires, finishing with V then enter to join the jumper back to the botton strip.

Once connected you should have the bottom coppers with gaps where you need to spot-drill . I made a symbol for this whic I dropoped into the gaps that indicated copper that needed splitting.

Print the top layer on a sheet of paper. Experiment with the print settings to get output you want. This is effectively the top screen layer.

Print the bottom layer but reverse it and omit the top layer stuff, just the bottom tracks and your spot-drill symbols.

Cut out and glue the top layer paper onto your stripboard aligning two component legs witht he holes in the board. Now you can populate the PCB.

When done populating use the bottom layer printout as a guide to spot-drill the track cuts. I don't glue this on I just use it as a reference.
 

Last changed: 13. August, 2018 at 17:43

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