IEEE MSU Student Branch.
Running hands-on workshops that take students from a blank KiCad schematic to a soldered, firmware-flashed board they built themselves.
00.01 — Context
I have been Technical Director of the IEEE MSU Student Branch since February 2026. In this role, I am responsible for the branch’s technical programming and the workshops where students learn to build.
00.02 — The workshop
I am co-leading a hands-on workshop that takes students through the entire path from nothing to a working PCB:
- Schematic capture : the design as a set of connections, before it is a physical object.
- PCB layout in KiCad : turning that netlist into copper, and confronting the fact that the physical arrangement is not a formality.
- SMD soldering: the part everyone is intimidated by and nobody should be.
- Firmware development : because a board that does nothing is a coaster.
The students leave with a board they designed, assembled, and programmed themselves. That is the whole point. There is a particular moment when someone’s board does the thing for the first time, and it is a completely different kind of learning than anything a lecture produces.
00.03 — Making it buildable
The less visible half of the job is design work that happens before anyone shows up: component selection and BOM management for the workshop boards.
Designing a board for a workshop is a genuinely different constraint problem than designing one for yourself. Cost has to stay low enough that a student branch can fund a room full of them. Every part has to be actually in stock, in quantity. And the package sizes have to be solderable by someone who has never soldered before, which rules out a lot of parts that would otherwise be the obvious choice.
Balancing cost, availability, and electrical performance against teachability is a real design exercise, and it is the part of the role I did not expect to find interesting.