In this tutorial, we’ll be covering most of the processes that you’ll be going through to create a board. This of course, includes creating a schematic symbol from scratch. While KiCad’s libraries contain hundreds of common schematic symbols, you can’t expect the symbol for every single obscure microcontroller to be included. For instance, we will have to create the symbol for the PIC12LF1501 microcontroller that is used in for this board. Doing this will require a bit of work with component datasheets, so expect to learn a thing or two about reading them on top of learning KiCad.
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A datasheet is a document that contains all the information that you’d likely ever need on the characteristics and performance of an electronic component. This is evident in the fact that the document we just opened is 292 pages long – don’t . Don’t worry, we’re only here for just a few of these pages. Flip (or scroll, I guess) to page five three of the document, the section labelled Pin Diagrams. Pin diagrams are simply schematics that give the locations and functions of each of the pins on the microcontroller. We will be copying this into our editor to get the symbol we need. If it helps, I’ve put the diagram that we’ll be working with below:
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To begin, let’s create the rectangle that will be the “body” of the symbol. On the right toolbar, click on the 
Add a rectangle button and create it by clicking on the points to be the top-left corner and bottom-right corners of the box. The box shouldn’t be too big or small. On the bottom of the window you should see the current X and Y coordinates of your cursor. Use that info to create a box that is approximately 20 x 15 units20mm x 15mm. You can ensure that the units that your coordinate system is using are millimeters by clicking on the Use millimeters button on the left toolbar. If you want to move the box that you have created, you can do so by hovering your mouse over an edge of the box and pressing M to move it around. To resize the box, you can click on the edge of the box and drag the handles on the corners. To make the box stick out from the background, let’s add a fill color to it. Do this by hovering your mouse over an edge of the box and pressing E to open the edit menu. From here, change the Fill Style to Fill with body background color. Modify your rectangle and move your labels around until you have something that looks like what’s below. Make sure that the center of the box is (0, 0) as indicated by it being centered with the two blue axis lines.
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Click OK and you will be able to choose where to put the pin. Put it roughly where it is on the datasheet, with the right end of the line connected to the border of the box. Move the label if desired. Now, onto the rest of the pins. To make it easier on you, there’s a table on the next page below that specifies the properties you will need to set for all the pins. Also, here’s a reminder to save often.
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Pin Name | Pin Number | Electrical Type | Orientation |
VDD | 1 |   |   |
RA5 | 2 |   |   |
RA4 | 3 |   | |
RA3/~MCLR~{MCLR} | 4 | |   |
RA2 | 5 |   |   |
RA1/ICSPCLK | 6 | | |
RA0/ICSPDAT | 7 |   |   |
VSS | 8 |   | |
Note: You can add a bar over text by putting a tilde in front of and wrapping it in curly braces (e.g. `~MCLR``~{MCLR}`)
And we’re done! Hopefully, you now have a decent grasp on how to create custom symbols in KiCad. That wasn’t too bad, right? Unfortunately, we won’t be covering how to create custom component footprints in this tutorial – they’re made from scratch a lot less frequently than symbols are due to how standardized component dimensions are – but this process is very similar to that too. If you’d like to, mess around with the Footprint Editor yourself and see what you can do. For now, save your symbol and close the Schematic Editor.
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