How it works

Design your first PCB in five steps

Protoboard Designer is a WYSIWYG circuit board editor: you draw the board you want to hold in your hands, and that exact layout is what gets fabricated. No schematic capture, no netlists, no EDA background required. Here is the whole journey from empty canvas to a board you can order — it takes about ten minutes in the web app or the Android app.

Step 1

Create a new board

Start a new project and set the board dimensions. For a first board, keep it small — 50 × 50 mm keeps parts close together, so you spend your time designing instead of panning around the canvas. You can resize the board at any point if the project grows.

Tip: the grid you see is your friend. Components and traces snap to it, which keeps the layout tidy and solderable.
Step 2

Place component footprints

A footprint is the pattern of copper pads and silkscreen that matches a real-world part. Open the footprint library, search for what you need — “resistor”, “LED”, “DIP-8” — and drag it onto the board. Rotate parts before you drop them so pads line up with your routing plan.

Beyond the built-in library you can import footprints from KiCad libraries or add any public GitHub repository as a footprint source, so the parts you already use elsewhere come with you.

Tip: on many footprints, pin 1 is marked with a square pad — use it to check polarity against the part's datasheet before you solder.
Step 3

Route copper traces

Select the Track tool, click the pad you want to start from, and click the destination pad. The copper you draw on screen is exactly the copper a fabricator will etch. Add waypoints at grid intersections to steer traces around other copper.

Need a ground plane? AutoGround pours copper around your traces in one action and keeps the pour up to date as the layout changes — no manual repouring.

Step 4

Check your design

Before anything gets manufactured, run the built-in Design Rule Check (DRC). It scans the layout for shorts, clearance violations, and unconnected copper, and points at each finding directly on the board so you can fix it in seconds.

Tip: run DRC early and often, not just at the end — problems are cheapest to fix while the layout is still fluid.
Step 5

Export and build it

Two ways to turn the design into a physical board:

  1. Order it: export industry-standard Gerber files and upload them to any PCB fab — JLCPCB, PCBWay, OSH Park, Aisler, or your local board house.
  2. Etch it at home: export a PDF mask — mirrored for toner transfer or photoresist — print it at 1:1 scale, and etch the board yourself.

Your project is cloud-synced the whole time, so you can start on a laptop, tweak on your phone, and export from either.

Keep reading