Charizard-PCB-Card

Charizard USB-C LED card

Four orange LEDs sit in the four Fire Spin symbols and are designed to light steadily when a powered USB-C cable is connected. This revision includes the schematic, routed PCB, bill of materials, assembly positions and fabrication files as well as the silkscreen and gold artwork.

The clearer supplied Charizard card image is converted directly into white front silkscreen. Its original picture and lettering are retained as traced image geometry. The source image is included in source/.

The front keeps the approved inverted appearance: dark source details expose green mask, and the light areas are white silkscreen. Gold accents follow the original yellow border, picture frame and main fire-energy symbols. The traced picture, lettering and full-size placement are preserved.

Open hardware/charizard-card.kicad_pro in KiCad 9 or later. The native PCB and the editable SVG in artwork/silkscreen.svg are included. The artwork is on F.SilkS and grouped for editing. Copper, mask and outline exports are in fabrication/.

USB-powered LED revision

• Board: 63 × 88 mm, R3 corners, 0.6 mm thick, two copper layers.
• Appearance: green solder mask, white silkscreen and exposed ENIG gold accents.
• Front-only assembly; the back has plain mask over the routing and tented vias, apart from the connector's required contacts and protective silkscreen.
• The AnasMalas PCB-edge USB-C footprint is retained at the bottom.
• Four Kingbright APG1608SEKC/T orange LEDs, one in each Fire Spin energy icon.
• USB supplies the LEDs directly at 5 V; no programming, battery or switch.

Circuit and power-on behavior

All four VBUS contacts feed a 100 mA-hold resettable PTC fuse, followed by a 2.2 µF input capacitor and the four LED branches. Each branch has its own 820 Ω, 1% series resistor. Each LED cathode returns to ground. All four USB ground contacts are connected.

CC1 and CC2 each have a separate 5.1 kΩ, 1% pull-down to ground. This identifies the card as a USB-C power sink in either cable orientation. The CC pins are not joined. There is no USB data interface and no USB Power Delivery request for a voltage above 5 V.

Using 5 V and an illustrative 2.05 V LED forward drop gives about 3.6 mA per LED, or 14.4 mA for all four. Approximately 15 mA is a useful expected operating figure; actual forward voltage and brightness at this small current must be measured on the prototype. Even assuming zero LED forward voltage, 5.5 V input and the resistors at their 1% low limit bounds the steady LED-branch load below 27.2 mA. This bound excludes the brief capacitor charging pulse at connection.

The PTC is a 100 mA hold / 300 mA trip part, not a precise current limiter. No transient/ESD qualification has been performed. A USB-C wall charger is a straightforward source for display use; some power banks shut down small loads.

Open hardware/charizard-card.kicad_sch to inspect the circuit. Part numbers and values are in hardware/BOM.csv; front assembly coordinates are included.

The source image fills the exact 63 × 88 mm PCB face, starting at (0,0), with no added frame or margin. Ink is clipped to the actual rounded outline and USB-C cutout, with 0.20 mm artwork edge clearance and clear connector contacts. The connector's original protective silk is preserved separately. artwork/silkscreen.svg is the full-size source trace; artwork/silkscreen-production.svg is the clipped production artwork. artwork/gold-production.svg defines the visible gold mask openings; artwork/gold-copper-production.svg defines the copper beneath them. No lettering or character artwork was redrawn. The conversion settings and script are included.

Gold finish

The gold is actual front copper with soldermask openings, specified for an ENIG surface finish. It is electrically isolated decorative metal. Copper extends 0.08 mm under the surrounding green mask, and white silk clears the gold openings by 0.18 mm. Decorative copper clears the board edge by at least 0.25 mm, routed front circuitry by at least 0.25 mm, and the original connector contacts by at least 0.50 mm. The importer checks these distances geometrically and clears the artwork around component pads and vias. Decorative gold has no assigned electrical net and is kept separate from the powered circuit.

Use the supplied copper and soldermask Gerbers together, and retain ENIG when ordering; the mask openings alone do not specify a gold surface finish.

Prototype review

The supplied raster is 696 × 982 pixels. Its smallest lettering and isolated details may merge or disappear in physical silkscreen printing. The files preserve the traced source detail; the preview does not establish print yield.

Native KiCad DRC reports no errors and two retained warnings for the original connector protective silkscreen at the routed edge. Confirm the fabricator's silkscreen clipping policy and the connector's 0.6 mm thickness/tolerances before making a sample. Schematic/ERC, netlist matching and final-board checks are included in the validation files. The complete card has not been physically fabricated or electrically tested. Check polarity and shorts before first power-up, then verify illumination in both cable orientations on a prototype.

Connector source and CC0 license are in source/pcb-edge-usb-c/, from https://github.com/AnasMalas/pcb-edge-usb-c. The supplied Pokémon artwork is retained as user-provided reference material; no ownership of it is claimed.

Optional artwork rebuild

artwork/convert_source.py records the bitmap-to-vector conversion and gold selection, tuned to the included source image. It needs Pillow, NumPy, SciPy, Shapely, svgpathtools, the Potrace shared library and Inkscape. The provided SVGs can be edited directly without rebuilding. tools/import_silkscreen.py uses KiCad's pcbnew Python module and Shapely.

From the project directory, with the dependencies and KiCad Python available:

python3 artwork/convert_source.py source/Charizard-original.png
python3 tools/import_silkscreen.py hardware/charizard-led-base.kicad_pcb artwork/silkscreen-geometry.json hardware/charizard-card.kicad_pcb --gold artwork/gold-geometry.json

The native importer clips both artwork layers to the actual board and connector outline. Its report is validation/artwork-import.json.

Electrical references

• Kingbright LED data: https://www.kingbrightusa.com/images/catalog/SPEC/APG1608SEKC-T.pdf
• Bourns PTC data: https://www.bourns.com/docs/product-datasheets/mf-fsmf.pdf
• USB-IF Type-C functional test specification, March 2024: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/USB%20Type%20C%20Functional%20Test%20Specification%202024%2003%2003.pdf