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Note that I mentioned a few other applications in the descriptions above such as the Schematic Editor, Symbol Editor, and PCB Editor. “But wait, isn’t KiCad all I need to make cool boards?” you may ask. You see, KiCad is an Electronics Design Automation Suite, and its functionality is contained within several programs, most of which you will use going through in this tutorial.
Project Creation
Now that we have some understanding of the UI, let’s get started on building our board. First, we will need to create a new project. This can be done by going to File > New > New Project…, hitting the Ctrl+N hotkey, or simply just clicking on the 
Create new blank project icon on the toolbar. A file browser will open up, in which you can choose a location to create the KiCad project file. By default, a new folder with the project name will be created at the chosen location and the file itself will be within it.
Upon creation, you will notice that the project directory area has been updated and now contains a .kicad_pro file with a .kicad_pcb and .kicad_sch file within it. All the files you need to create a PCB. We're not ready to start quite yet though, as we are missing a few custom component symbols and footprints that we will need for our board. To remedy this, we will be downloading and importing a few KiCad libraries.
Library Imports
We will be downloading some symbol libraries from the team’s GitHub to get the parts we need. Since this is not a GitHub tutorial (nag the software lead for this or something), I’ll go through the process quite quickly. If you’re Git-savvy and want to make this quick, just clone Waterloo Rocketry’s electrical_tutorials repo found at https://github.com/waterloo-rocketry/electrical_tutorials. If you’re new to GitHub, don’t worry! While you will probably need to learn the technology at some point in the future, it’s quite easy to get what we currently need done. Simply navigate to the above link on your favorite browser and load the page. On the page, above the file list, click on the Download Code button. From its drop-down, click on Download ZIP and a .zip file will download.
Inside the folder within the zip file you will find a few subfolders filled with tutorial files from various years, including the one that you’re currently doing. These files may come in handy if you get stuck and want to see the final product to help lead the way. Navigate to ./2022_generic and copy the Tutorial_Footprints.pretty and Tutorial_Symbols.kicad_sym files into the project folder that you have created. The project directory should now look like what's below:
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There are two types of libraries in KiCad. Those that have the .kicad_sym extension contain symbols for electrical schematics, while libraries that have the .pretty extension like ours contain component footprints and silkscreens to be used during the PCB design stage. These libraries in particular contain some silkscreen Waterloo Rocketry logos and a footprint for a connector that we will need.
Let’s get this library hooked up to our project so we can actually use it – just moving it into the folder does nothing. Go back to KiCad and navigate to Preferences > Manage Footprint Libraries… You should be met with the Footprint Libraries window in which you can manage all your KiCad footprints. There are two tabs to this window: one for Global Libraries, footprint libraries that all your KiCad projects have access to, and Project Specific Libraries, libraries that can only be accessed by our current project. Switch to the Project Specific Libraries tab and click on the Add Existing Library to Table button. A file browser will open, choose the Tutorial_Footprints.pretty file that is in your project directory. If everything was done correctly then the library table should now look like what’s below:
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Since the process for adding a symbol library and footprint library is exactly the same, you should now know not only how to import footprint libraries, but also symbol libraries. All you need to do is repeat what you have just done to add the symbol library, except select Manage Symbol Libraries… from the preferences drop-down and when selecting a file, select Tutorial_Symbols.kicad_sym.
Now you should be all set up and ready to get started with using the powerful applications that KiCad contains. The next step is to create a custom schematic symbol for your PIC microcontroller, get started in the next section.