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4.1. PCB design
This page is mostly meant for those with little or no experience in schematic and pcb design.
First and foremost, expect that things will not work or that there will be issues in the first design. Keep that in mind, try not to make too large of a design and divide PCBs into smaller boards that can be tested to make sure a specific part works.
You first need to create a schematic, this is required to make a pcb.
This video is a good and concise tutorial for how to go from schematic to pcb.
This is hard to say, and requires a lot of googling. Looking what other teams have done through the TDP search engine is likely the best starting point. After that you can try to find the most simple ICs, which works for your requirement. A lot of googling is likely required here.
Maybe obvious to electrical engineers, but from our experience these components are just used to make signals more smooth which is important, but also don't think to hard about it. A capacitor discharges voltage when there is a voltage drop, an inductor "keeps" some current which is released when the current drops.
Follow the guidelines from the datasheets of components you use and this will likely be fine.
Majority of the project designs are created using KiCad, it is free, basic and has some nice toolings to get started. But use whatever you want
A mistake we made early on was using too small track widths, likely causing one of the traces to burn off. This is very important for high current traces. You can use online tools or KiCads "Calculator Tools" to calculate and make sure that the width or large enough.
Same as trace widths, vias also have a maximum current. Use calulator tools and place several vias for high current
There is always cross talk between traces, this is caused by high transients when a signal goes high or low. For high speed signals this is an important consideration. As a general rule of thumb make sure that you place traces as far away as possible from other traces, this also applies for traces between multi-layer boards.
Before starting you should at least watch these two videos, which would have saved us from some early mistakes.
You can also take a look at the pcb part of this video, wihch talks about component placement, layers and how some general good to know things
These are more specific but also nice if you are curios.