Easyduino: Open Source PCB Devboards for KiCad

I enjoyed your post - PCB routing is often an act of 'zen and the art of..' for me and I recently did a similar exercise for an esp32.

Does this help you build a custom PCB that you would send to a factory or like just design and simulate something you could build on your own? Or both / neither? I'm not fully understanding what this project does, could you offer insight?

Worst is when I have a full board and schematic, but its for some other EDA program. Importing EagleCAD shit into KiCAD is agonizing, endless tedium. It's not like I'm not grateful to have free and open-source designs (specifically I'm talking about Adafruit, I like them, but all they use is EagleCAD), but goddamnit why can't it just be easy for once :(

I could imagine small companies that rely on these boards and that also have their fab and sourcing pipelines set up would be able to easier source these themselves. Just have to generate the Gerbers (fabrication output format most manus need) and then send it off as part of a larger order, etc.

Especially if you're able to replace certain small/passive components with those you already have in bulk, it could be a potential cost cutting measure.

Just a guess though.

For my case, they'd be useful if I wanted to know how certain subcircuits are designed or laid out.

Even for beginners, taking it into kicad, enabling the selection of only tracks and vias and deleting them all, then doing a full re-layout of the board as practice would be a cool project if you're wanting to learn.

I've got some projects that use ADCs on Pi "Hats" that connect to controls, I could see a future version which integrates that ADCs and pots directly onto the board to get a slimmer profile. It's quite handy, I wonder what the unit cost is with assembly at JLCPCB.