Verification: Requirement 1.7 – Printed Circuit Board

/in , /by

Posted by: Luis Valdivia (Project Manager)
Written by: Anthony Becerril (Mission, Systems, and Test Engineer)

 

Following the Verification and Validation Matrices, this post follows the level 1 requirement 1.7 – designing and manufacturing a Printed Circuit Board (PCB). This also satisfies its corresponding level 2 requirements if applicable.

 

To meet the requirement a PCB had to be designed, laid out, and manufactured to work properly. The way to verify proper function of the PCB is testing hardware and software. The hardware consists of the buck converter functioning correctly and software operating servos and lightshow working correctly.

 

Hardware:
Our quadcopter power source is our 14.7V LiPo Battery which is too high of a voltage to power most of our components. We would need 5 volts which led us to use a buck converter to step down the voltage. On our PCB we have an Surface Mount Device (SMD) buck converter and has successfully outputted 5 volts on the PCB pins when inputting 14.7 volts. Although after testing servos we took note in that a different buck converter will be needed in the future due to a lack of current draw that won’t power more than one servo smoothly.

 

Software:
On our PCB we also have an I2C SMD chip which executes the Arduino IDE or MultiWii IDE from the respective board to the PCB and executing the commands for the servos. We tested the Adafruit servo driver code was used and through an Arduino we were able to successfully power a servo as required by our verification matrix.

 

Supporting documentation is provided below as we have completed and passed this requirement.

 

Video of 5 Volts on PCB
Video of servo working

 

Additional Resources:

Previous Blog Post: Verification and Validation Matrices (Spring 2016)
Previous Blog Post: PCB Design: Schematic – Spring 2016
Previous Blog Post: UFO PCB Layout Spring 2016
Previous Blog Post: Prototype: Fritzing and Breadboarding – Spring 2016