Devlog 8

Today I started off by completely organizing my project files because things were getting way too messy to actually work efficiently. Once that was cleaned up, I ran the schematic-to-PCB sync in KiCad to pull all my components into the PCB editor, which immediately helped me catch a few footprint issues. I realized I had accidentally mixed up the footprint for my DRV8329 driver chip with my MCU, so I went back and properly assigned the QFN footprint for the AT32 MCU and imported the custom library folder for the Bourns CRE2512 current shunt resistor. I also sorted out the final connector footprints, adding a 3-pin JST-SH vertical connector for the flight controller interface signals like DSHOT and raw power, plus solid through-hole test pads for the three motor phase outputs. After clearing out all the sync errors, every single component from the MCU down to the connectors has a valid physical footprint attached. The schematic is officially completely finished for real this time, and I am finally ready to jump straight into component placement and routing on the PCB.

Devlog #7

WE ARE DONE… with the schematic… :(
I finally finished wiring up the entire schematic for this block and cleaned up all the remaining loose ends
Used an 3V3 rail and renamed a ton of stuff
Added a bunch of resistors and capacitors as a backup power just in case

I am officially ready to move past the schematic capture phase and start the physical PCB layout

Devlog #6

Day 7 was all about adding critical passive components to the gate driver schematic so the hardware can actually boot up and run safely. These include capacitors and Resistors.

In the Schematic we have:
three 1µF 50V X7R ceramic capacitors (C1, C2, C3)
separate decoupling capacitors (1µF and 0.1µF) to clean up electrical noise.
a 200kΩ resistor to ground to lock in a 20 V/V gain threshold for tracking motor current for the CSAGAIN

Devlog #5

Day 6 was all about getting off the drawing board and starting the actual schematic wiring for the ESC.

my friend started something about the code idrk…

in the meantime, i was able to get one esc almost finished. it was getting late so im going to go to sleep however, the goal next time i lock in is to finish schematics and move on. im thinking about doing a copper pour to make my life a lot easier. i think it will also be better for the amount of power that is getting put into this thing. the screenshots show just ONE of the ESC’s. i feel like this was the only way that this would be manageable. (breaking it up into 4 smaller parts.)

needed to do a lot a lot of research on what exactly all the pins did. was able to figure out most of them.

if anyone sees any errors pleaseeee tell me i lwk dont want to cook my motherboard…

Devlog #4

Talked about Outpost and talked about how we would code the drone.

We need to finalize how we will do the code. + all of the important protocols that we need to use. After that we can both go on our individual ways to CAD/code the drone.

We also talked about how we can implement PID into the software side of things. We might talk to a robotics person we know if he can help us.

We were talking about how we can design each of the ESC’s. Turns out this might be easier that we expected…

Overall productive session because we have not been working for a while.

Devlog #4

to push the drone to 200mph we laid out the architecture for a custom 4-in-1 Electronic Speed Controller (ESC) designed to handle extreme current.
the last photo shows our design that we came up with. it was inspired by the design of the SpeedyBee F405 V5 55A.

then we worked on creating our shopping list and things that we need to buy to flush out the drone. while doing this we realized how expensive this would get. Realizing this we asked Alfie however he redirected us to Max which i sent another message to, we shall see how this works out…

next is to finish the shopping cart, see if we can/should continue then open up KiCAD!

Devlog #3 Looking for Products

wait i didnt realize that i could type here 😭

so i guess ill explain the past 3 days the best that I can!

the first day me and my friend figured out the best that we could on how we would but I completely blanked on the fact that i was supposed to be recording a timelapse of the process. because of that, a massive chunk of the mental heavy lifting is already done behind the scenes.

if you look back in day 2 (yesterday) we did all the layout needed. however today we flushed out the power part of the schematic.
we decided to buy the GPS part of the drone because after doing some research we found that it is basically impossible to do it ourselves.

we now need to figure out what we need to buy. so we created the shopping list using google sheets. we found some items however we need to finish it up.

after that ill get be using KiCAD until my computer dies 😭

Devlog #2: Schematic Hell