
PCB Design
Our PCB Design is now in its third and final version. After iterating on both Revision 1.0 and Revision 2.0, Revision 3.0 is the culmination of a year of work to perfect the main hub for all the avionics in our rocket. The board is now laid out in a much easier way to build and test with. More voltage levels have been added, and we can now use more actuators and sensors. This allows us the flexibility of performing any actuation or reading we will come across.

A main focus of this revision was to streamline the rest of the hardware development. If two related components were on opposite sides of the board, it would cause us to flip back and forth during testing since it is double-sided. In this revision, this problem is eliminated by placing all the components that need to be accessible on one side and all the components that we don’t need to access on the other.
Another difference between this revision and previous ones is the elimination of the voltage step-up. A higher-voltage power system was designed utilizing two 14V lithium-polymer batteries, eliminating the need to step down then step up multiple times to other voltages. The traces on the board were also increased in size to reduce unnecessary resistivity losses.
Overall, this new PCB design should help speed up development and handle anything we throw at it, whether that is temperature sensors, pressure sensors, triggering valves, or even lighting an e-match!

The final board revision was produced for us by our awesome sponsor, www.customcircuitboards.com!