Electrical Designs

This year we have made our own custom PCBs which are able to power and control various parts of the rover. Our designs consist our Boost converters able to power the Jetson TX2, motors and able to control our arm, drive motors and science modules!

Check our website for updates we will be doing and more boards that we have manufactured!

Check out our designs below!

Updates to existing boards and new board designs will be released every few months

Battery monitoring system

Chassis control

LED Board

Boost Converter

Boost Converter (BOOST)

Parameters:
Input: 11.9 - 12.1 V
Output: 24V
Max Load Current: 10A
Output Ripple: 20mV

Manufacturing Parameters:
FR4 TG-140
2 layers, 1oz copper

Designer: Evan Gintonis

Drive Motor Controller (DMC)

Description:
Uses the external microcontroller mounted to provide control signals to the drive motors and gather feedback to send to the Jetson TX2

Microcontroller: STM32F103C8T6

Designer: Evan Gintonis

Stepper Motor Controller (SMC)

Description:
Uses the external microcontroller mounted to provide control signals to the stepper motors on the rover arm. The board also receives feedback from limit switches and hall effect sensors to aid in stepper motor control.

Microcontroller: STM32F103C8T6

Designer: Evan Gintonis

Fan & Temperature Control Board (FTC)

Description:
Provides a way to control 2 pin fans via the GPIO header by means of PWM. The board also gathers temperature data at key locations inside the rover chassis. 

Temperature data is acquired by connecting our temperature monitor boards. The temperature monitor boards only have an NTC and resistor and feeds back an analog signal to the FTC, the FTC will then determine the voltage via the ADC and forwards the data to the Jetson.

Designer: Matthew Lemcke

 Battery Monitoring System (BMS)

Description:
Provides a way to actively monitor the battery voltage level and provides visual indicators when cell voltage drop below a predefined threshold. This board focuses on a analog design using opamps as voltage subtractors and Schmidt triggers.

Designer: Michael Knapman


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LED Indicator Boards (LEDI)

Description:
LEDI is expected to be mounted to the outside of the rover chassis to provide visual indication of current rover state. By competition guidelines, all teams are required to have visual indicators to show if the rover is in autonomous mode, manually controlled, or successful completion of task.

The LEDI board is a simple LED driver with an external controller. The Jetson TX2 is expected to interface with this board to provide control signals and proper indication.

Currently there are two different LEDI boards: one is through-hole LEDs and the other is surface mount LEDs. We are currently using the board with through-hole LEDs, but we included both here since surface mount is always cool :) 

Designer: Matt Lemcke and Joelle D'Amico

Science Control Module (SENSING)

Description:
SENSING is the original design of the science control board. It is intended to integrate with the science mechanical module to control stepper motors, motors, etc. while also taking feedback from various sensors for soil data analysis and experiment control. 

The board is currently being updated to support revisions on the science sub-team.

Designer: Justin Chan