Giving the People what they Want
Ever since the rampant success of my Arduino Tutorial Series, requests for a set of tutorials focusing on PCB and schematic design have been steadily flowing into my inbox. I’ve been using CadSoft Eagle in my research lab, at MakerBot Industries, and for personal projects, including the Arduino Tutorial Series, for several years. Lots of open hardware companies such as Adafruit and Sparkfun rely on Eagle to design all the kits and moduels that they sell. When element14 acquired CadSoft, it was immediately obvious to me that I should make a tutorial series to teach people about circuit design. Since element14 already sponsors me, setting up the series was a breeze.
Learning by Doing
As with all my other videos, the Eagle Tutorial Series puts a large emphasis on educating viewers via experimentation. I walk through the design of a simple circuit, but I outline all the important software tools along the way. Further, I release all the accompanying design files and explicit documentation so that users can more easily use my work as a reference for their own projects. In the few weeks following the release of the first two videos, they received tens of thousands of unique views and generated hundreds of new users at element14. This series is still in progress, with more videos coming. As with my other videos, I welcome suggestions from viewers so I can best guide my videos to suit the interests and desires of my audience. You can watch the series via this youtube playlist (warning – these videos are very detailed, and therefore very long):
Supporting Documentation and Schematics for all Eagle Tutorials
The content I create in the Eagle Tutorial Series is 100% open source. The Eagle tutorial category on my blog is the best place to get content for each tutorial, but you can also download all the materials at once from my github repository. All Eagle tutorial supporting materials are distributed under the GNU General Public (Open-Source) License. Please Attribute and Share-Alike.
Useful Links
- My Eagle Tutorial Series Blog Category
- Eagle Tutorial Series Playlist on youtube.com
- Eagle Community on element14.com