Project 03

Golden Arduino PCB Design Project

A custom Arduino-compatible board designed from scratch in Altium — laid out for signal integrity, then benchmarked on the bench against a commercial Arduino.

Completed Hardware · PCB Design

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Overview

The Golden Arduino project set out to design and validate a fully custom, Arduino-compatible board from the ground up in Altium Designer — not just replicating the reference design, but improving on it where the layout allowed. The board keeps USB programming support and Uno R3 shield compatibility, so it drops into the same ecosystem as a stock Arduino while being built and tuned in-house.

Success was measured against the thing it was meant to replace: a commercial Arduino Uno, benchmarked directly on the bench with an oscilloscope.

My Role

Designed a custom Arduino-compatible PCB in Altium Designer with USB programming support and Uno R3 shield compatibility.
Optimized the layout for signal integrity — decoupling capacitor placement, shortened traces, and refined component placement.
Integrated test points, indicator LEDs, power regulation, and USB-to-UART communication circuitry.
Validated the board with oscilloscope-based signal integrity and power-noise analysis, benchmarked against a commercial Arduino.

Tech Stack

Altium Designer PCB Layout Signal Integrity Oscilloscope Testing USB-to-UART