I spent this session totally cleaning up the schematics because they were honestly looking extremely dirty, so I got everything organized and looking right.I also learned some pretty interesting stuff about grounding this time. I literally had no idea that all the grounds were supposed to be the same; I kind of figured different parts of the system would have different grounds. After messing around with it for a bit, I realized all the ground planes are the same but they absolutely have to be interconnected, so I went ahead and fixed that whole setup.

Another thing I realized is that I couldn’t find a UBEC that drops 12V down to 6V—they pretty much only come in 12V to 5V steps. Because of that, I had to pivot and shift the entire servo motor system over to run on 5V instead.

I also added some really nice-to-have features, including three indicator LEDs:
One is a fault indicator to show if anything goes wrong in the system.

The second one shows that the digital pins are working and the code is actually running.

The third one signifies that the UBEC power from the main system is coming in cleanly.

Along with those three status LEDs, I added a physical reset button. I had to move a few components around here and there to make space, but it was honestly pretty easy this time because the actual PCB layout was already solid.

The best part is that the only errors popping up on the DRC test are footprint overlaps, which is amazing since those aren’t even true electrical errors. The board is fully sorted, and it looks seriously cool with the new silkscreen graphics on it.