I finally received the rest of the components for the motherboard ! took me some hours to populate everything (QFN packages take a bit of time to solder when you are not used to 😀 )The smoke test passed for the Power supplies (7.6V, 5V) but I still have to test the battery charger… which gives me a bit of apprehensions because I don’t want to fry my battery
I will definitely have to make an improved version in the next few weeks to fix the following issues:
- Lack of thermal exchange for the PSU controller and MOSFET
- Change from 10DOF IMU board to a 9DOF IMU (LSM9DS1TR)
- Separate I2C bus for the Eyes (they use too much bandwidth forth rest of the sensors)
- Overall Routing & Layout improvements
- More detailled SilkScreen
But first I have to finish testing all the features and components to see if further modifications are required. But for now I’m pretty happy with the result, no big trouble. I did some thermal test and the PSU is around 40°C in idle mode without cooling and 35°C when the fan is active, even so the thermal dissipation of the component in not ideal and the fan is powered at 3V3 instead of 5V.
As mentioned, I still have the rest of the features to test (around 15: Telemeter, Bluetooth, Charger, Raspberry Pi communication, Servos, etc…) so stay tune 🙂