KiCad¶

May 16, 2026
in Hardware, PCB, KiCad, Milestone
7 min read

Dilder Full Board Rev 1 — One Green Rectangle to Rule Them All

After two months of breadboards, flying wires, hot-glued battery clips, and a stack of off-the-shelf modules taped to the inside of a 3D-printed case, the Dilder is finally a single board. One PCB. One green rectangle the size of a chocolate bar. Everything the octopus needs to live, lives on it.

This is a huge milestone, so this post is the friendly tour — what got built, what got learned, and why the silkscreen says "The Dildafication Begins" on the front.

April 26, 2026
in Hardware, PCB, KiCad
3 min read

Hand-Routed Joystick Breakout PCB — First Board From Scratch

Designed my first PCB from scratch in KiCad 10 — a hand-routed joystick breakout board for the Dilder's K1-1506SN-01 5-way navigation switch. No autorouter this time, just manual trace placement, silkscreen labels, and a ground plane. The board fits the 20x20mm pocket already milled into the Rev 2 top cover.

April 26, 2026
in Hardware, PCB, KiCad
5 min read

Joystick Breakout PCB Rev 2.0 — Real Footprint, Real Pinout, Real Autoroute

Yesterday's joystick breakout PCB shipped with three quietly serious bugs: a hand-drawn switch footprint with the wrong pad geometry, a wire pad that physically overlapped a mounting hole, and a pinout I'd half-invented because I hadn't read the Alps datasheet diagram. Rev 2.0 fixes all three by stealing real reference designs and runs the full autorouter pipeline headless from the CLI.