What about making your own custom PCB boards with your own branding? Doesn't that sound nice? PCB manufacturing has now become easier than ever before with the coming of brands like PCB Way. We can order our PCB just like any other shopping experience, by uploading the design in Gerber file format.

What is a Gerber file?

Gerber is a file format for printed circuit boards. It contains the data of the different layers of the PCB as per the design, Copper layers, solder mask, legend, drill data, etc. Most of the PCB design software supports the Gerber export option.

ESP32 dev board

Eespressif the manufacturer of ESP32 published some opensource dev kit circuits diagrams: https://dl.espressif.com/dl/schematics/esp32_devkitc_v4-sch.pdf

By following those schematics anyone can design their custom boards. In addition to the basic peripherals like serial to parallel convertor IC CH340G for uploading the code, reset button, flash button etc we can add our custom pin configuration and components as per our requirements. In my case, I have taken out a set of pinouts for easily connecting different sensors/modules/servo directly which follows a common pin configuration (eg: VCC-D0-D1-GND).

And another major advantage is that we can use the latest version of ESP32 with the required flash memory eg(4/8/16 MB). Almost all the dev boards available in the market are coming with a 4MB version of ESP32.

Design schematics & PCB in an EDA software

I have tried KiCad(Opensource installable software) and EasyEDA (Web app) for designing PCBs for various projects. EeasyEDA contains a large collection of components library . All the components listed here are available for the PCB Assembly service of PCBWay!

Export Gerber and order your PCB

Gerber file is exported as Zip file which contains all the layer-by-layer details. We can upload this Zip to PCBWay to see the dimension of your PCB and the price for the selected quantity. It is only 5$ for 5pcs! (Excluding the shipping charge).

Then check mark for the Assembly service, which will cost an additional 30$ for 5 pcs.

Then add the parameters for the parts assembly as shown below then click on the save to cart button.

Now Upload the BOM (Bil of materials). Pick and Place the files both available and able to export in EasyEDA (both for this board are attached).

Then click on Order now!

Then checkout to make Payment and wait for the review for finishing the PCB file review from PCB way engineers. If there are any corrections required they will email you and assist you regarding the same.

After 10-20 days you will receive your PCB!

Testing and verification

Now connect your board to your PC and upload a test code. (I have uploaded the LED blink code). On this board onboard LED is connected to the GPIO2 of the ESP32. (How to program ESP32 - https://randomnerdtutorials.com/installing-the-esp32-board-in-arduino-ide-windows-instructions/). See your custom ESP32 in action! Happy development!