Main Board

From ARVP

Project Members:

Brodi Roberts
Darrel Ross
Chris Woloschuk

2009 Main Board:

The goal of the 2009 main board was to reduce the overall size of the 2008 main board, remove one micro-controller, add the components for the camera arm contoller and to do a general upgrade of the components and devices.

The biggest change to the overall board is the size. The new main board measures 105.74 mm wide and 160.27 mm tall, which is less that half the width of the original board. The height of the board was kept the same to be able to utlize the same holes on the electronics rack.

At the 2008 competition, our team did not utilize the second micro-controller and with the new embedded computer that is being implemented this year, the second microcontroller was not needed and this helped to reduce the size of the main board by quite a bit. The remaining microcontroller will be used for the sensor data just like in 2008.

The final major change to the main board was the addition of the camera arm controller which consists of a dsPIC18, and 12 pin header block and two 3 pin headers to control the servos of the camera arm.

Below is the PCB of the completed 2009 board.

Depreciated Information

2008 Main Board: The image below is the general layout of the main board as of September 21st, 2008. Future iterations of the board will be to remove one of the micro-controllers, remove unnecessary components and traces, and add functionality.

The main board design is done in our CAD program. On the ARVP computer, a shortcut to the tutorials is on the desktop ('CAD Tutorials'). The first tutorial is 'TU0117 Getting Started with PCB Design.'