2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The opportunity to design a custom printed circuit board (PCB) in a senior-level course is an impactful experience for electrical and computer engineering (ECE) students to reinforce concepts in circuit theory and system design. However, ECE students have a wide variety of experience levels with PCB design and assembly before beginning the course. Furthermore, the learning curve of electronics may reduce what can be accomplished in the course. To address this, students follow a tutorial for the design and assembly of a microcontroller-unit (MCU) breakout board at the start of the course. In this work, we detail the improvement of that introductory assignment in a senior-level course to teach essential and industry-relevant PCB design skills. Furthermore, we evaluate the effectiveness of this assignment in aiding student development of PCB skills and success in their capstone projects.

We have developed two separate PCBs for the improvement of the assignment. Both of them incorporate a more capable and modern MCU, resulting in different considerations for schematic design, PCB layout, soldering techniques, component selection, and programming. The new tutorials cover the design and assembly of a development board based on a choice of an ESP32-C3 or STM32F103 MCU. Students are asked to demonstrate the functionality of a circuit that does motor control, wireless communication, or sensor data reading. This provides students the opportunity to develop an understanding of basic circuits that can be leveraged to prototype their projects for applications such as Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, and wireless/radio frequency (RF).