/diy/ - Do It Yourself

>>1665920
>Could I get around it
maybe, but they might reject the job, those through-holes on your castellations might not get plated, and they certainly won't guarantee that pads will extend to the edge of the board much less plated over the side. you should watch some videos on prototype pcb board manufacture to see why (tl;dw: standard boards are aggregated onto a standard-size panel and milled out when complete and that's why they only cost 40 cents each)
Pic related could still be fairly thin. one drawback is that you'll need to mirror the pads on the footprint, or renumber the schematic symbol. you might also have to deal with the new z-offset of the board in your mechanical design. some board houses offer a range of substrate thicknesses for free or a nominal charge. while 1.6mm substrates are the default for prototype boards (mainboard in pic), 0.8mm substrates (module board in pic) are far from exotic and are probably enough to gain back the offset on the shield-can side. on the solder side, you could mount the ESP32 module with double-sided tape and leave the mainboard to float (which will be more stable due to the multiple, flush welds from contact face to contact face. if you have doubts, get some blank 0.8mm copper clad and use as spacers or washers to add support and improve shielding
>Also do I need to ground the the GND pad on the back of the module
signal quality and therefore range will improve greatly if you do. but you could probably get away with strapping the shield can to a cutout in the solder mask layer on the can side using copper tape, foil, or braid, if you have a good iron and hefty tip
>multi-layer
costs a bit more and takes some thinking/calculation, but sometimes it's priceless
>eagle
it's a bit more mature than KiCAD. but really, other anon's idea was lame. it's better off to git gud at designing and modifying your own footprints/symbols, because you *will* eventually encounter a reason to do so once you've done hardware long enough