Hello everyone,
I haven’t used a circuit board layout program before but I want to learn. I decided to try LibrePCB for my first project.
The trouble is I can’t find a good tutorial. Let’s say I want to lay out a circuit board that uses a 555 chip to blink an LED at 1 Hz. Simple project. Can someone explain or point me to the steps needed to do that?
To clarify where I’m at: I have studied the documentation at https://docs.librepcb.org/. The installation (on my mac) went smoothly, as did the installation of the libraries, including the TI library. Wonderful. Then the document takes a long detour through the structure of the libraries. Next, there is a little bit on how to create use the schematic editor and the board editor, but I’m baffled. Where are the devices? Where is the NE555 or LM555? Stuck.
Sincerely,
Peter Halverson
PS: I want to thank Urban Bruhin for tackling such a significant and useful project.
I think I agree with you Peter. I’ve made a very small number of PCB’s using Eagle and am a bit stumped. Like you I’ve just looked for a simple component (in my case a LM386) and I think I have to create one. This doesn’t seem right, I think I’m doing something wrong
Alex
Hi everybody,
the libraries currently don’t include a lot of components,
and indeed both the *555 and the LM386 are not yet available in the official librepcb libraries.
You can create these components in a local library, and with a bit of extra work you could make a pull request on one of the official libraries on github to make them available to other users.
Waiting till someone else adds them to the library doesn’t seem like a good option to me, as that could take quite a while.
Yep, the standard library is still very incomplete… The best approach currently is to create a library for yourself and to add all missing parts there.
And in case someone is an avid YouTuber: A video tutorial for LibrePCB would be really welcome 
We’d also be very happy to provide feedback to a draft video.
(In case I’m ever bored, I might do such a tutorial in a few months, but right now I have way too many unfinished projects that need to be prioritized…)
thanks for the awesome information.