My First PCB Design: Prototyping an Electronic Chessboard

In this post, I share my journey designing and prototyping my first PCB: a scaled-down electronic chessboard using an ESP32-S3, hall sensors, and WS2812 (NeoPixel) LEDs. I cover the motivations, design decisions, schematic and PCB layout challenges, and lessons learned while validating key concepts before scaling up to a full 8x8 board.