For this week, I was unable to be in-person in the lab (out sick). I did not produce a PCB, but I continued to practice design. I did not find kicad to be particularly beginner-friendly and I moved over to Leo's program, which I found to be far simpler to use and far more intuitive.
This is Leo's very helpful and user-friendly program to design a PCB.
Because this was my first experience ever engaging with electronics, I realize that I also needed to step back and learn some of the essentials. This independent study took the bulk of my time. I didn't want to skip forward and produce a circuit without knowing how it functioned. I did not understand most of what we covered in class because I lacked an understanding of such basics (even knowing how things like current and voltage work.). This was not something that was ever part of my educational experience. I'm taking note of what we should bring into every student's k-12 education; this seems like such essential knowledge for understanding the devices with which we interact all the time. I'm learning a lot about what we can add to curriculum for school districts with which I'm working.
As part of my self-study, I learned about breadboarding for the first time. I didn't even know the term breadboard previously! While I know breadboarding is not recommended because of the problematic connections and wire issues, all of the tutorials focused on this as a way to gain understanding in those essentials and I am not yet at the point of understanding how these systems work n order to design one effectively.
It would have been helpful for me to have this hands-on experience of actually physically working with a circuit on a breadboard to better understand the structure, but this was not possible this week. For input and output week, this is the plan for starting out.
I feel pretty far from being able to produce a functioning PCB at this point and I don't want to skip over core concepts--learning is, of course, my core goal for the class. I will be completing the design and production of a PCB for the final project if not sooner.