Kicad advice

[Max N]

Hi
Beginner's question about kicad. I want to place a DN2540 on my schematic, but there doesn't seem to be one. Are there additional libraries that I should download? Or what's my next step?
Cheers
Max

[Nick]

I just use a mosfet with the same footprint and pinout and amend the text.

Or use the above as a basis and create a new model, though that is with eagle, I would expect kicad is just the same.

[Max N]

Aaah, thanks Nick. Yes, I can see now that there are generic n-channel fets with the right pinouts (GDS = 123)
Perfect!

[ed]

I'm not sure whether it works with Kicad but I use library loader with design spark..might be worth looking at:

https://www.samacsys.com/library-loader/

[Max N]

Thanks Ed, I’ll take a look

[Max N]

Hi Ed - is samacsys windows only?
Not necessarily a show-stopper, but so far I’ve been using Kicad on a mac

[ed]

Ah....it may well be Max...

I've only used it on the windows machine with designspark as I beleive designspark is windows only.

[Max N]

No probs, in that case I may transfer this project over to a windows laptop.

[Max N]

I am just about ready to send my first pcb files to jlcpcb.
They recommend loading your files into a 3rd party gerber viewer as a final quality check before sending. I've done that using an online website - https://gerber-viewer.ucamco.com. Everything checks out, except that the ucamco viewer renders a green board which is smaller than my board edge.
The 3D viewer in KiCad renders the boards correctly (see below), and the edge layer is also rendered the correct size in the ucamco viewer.
Not sure if I'm explaining myself very well - in the ucamco viewer, if I look at the edge layer, it's a rectangle the same as the green board in the 3D KiCad viewer. But ucamco renders the green board several mm smaller than in the view below, and smaller than the edge. Should I be worried about this?

push-pull.png (183.69 KiB) Viewed 2122 times

[Max N]

Another favour please - this is what I have ended up with:

Screenshot pp.png (204.43 KiB) Viewed 2122 times

Any glaring errors?
I don't think I need a ground plane or anything?
Cheers

[Max N]

I went ahead and ordered some of these, they looked fine on the preview on the JLCPCB site, so fingers crossed!