I haven't made a ESP32 design, but I recently learnt KiCad and PCB design enough to do a RP235x board with a non-reference design choice (1.8v VDDIO). I only used the official hardware guide + LLMs for questions, and had it work on the first try - it wasn't too hard!
replyI agree LLMs are exceptionally helpful on this.
replyA substantial portion of the things you need to know about layout are summarised quite nicely in the 4 YouTube videos in a previous comment of mine
replyhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549063
Note that the audio in the first video doesn't start until 40 seconds in.
One thing I learned the hard way is the antenna must not lie on your PCB! Even if it's just board without copper. I didn't see this stated anywhere, but once you look, every devkit is doing that, the antenna sticks over the PCB. When I had it on the PCB I had very bad connectivity and very high power usage.
replyI have built one PCB with esp32-s3-wroom-1. Usb line is working and I can program the mcu module. However I could not make the ip5306 auto start on battery yet. And I am still unable to get audio from pcm5102a + pam8403 pipeline.
replyWhat I have well learned is It's a hard, time consuming and relatively expensive hobby.
Perhaps we could help each other?