Designing a breakout for crenellated (castellated?) pads

Question

I am brand new to PCB design, so far all i've made a simply 555 timer circuit with an led, a few resistors, a capacitor and a 555 timer and got it printed by OSHpark.

That was my first experience getting a board printed and with pcb design and i used it as warm up.

I am trying to design a PCB breakout board for this, the xs3868 mega-cheap chinese knock off bluetooth module. Here is the footprint, in case its not clear i only want to design footprints for the tiny squares on the upper and lower sides, the center area is just other junk on the board.

I was wondering if there was any advice for creating this. Can i use one of the footprint wizards or would these types of pads not really work for that?

Thanks for the advice!

P.S. I am pretty sure these are called crenellated pads but i have heard others call them castellated pads, so i just put both in the title.

Answer 1

I've only heard the term 'castellated' used for this type of feature. Unless more detail is provided with that footprint (specifically the pad dimensions), you can create pads that resemble that footprint, leaving a reasonable gap between each pad. E.g. the pitch is 1.3mm so the pad width could be ~1.0-1.1mm and pad height or about 1.5mm looks about right. Then just arrange them as shown in the footprint drawing. I don't normally use a footprint wizard unless there are a lot of pads. In this case you could probably create it manually quicker, especially since it's not a typical package.