How to use the Tracking Antenna Prototype Board

Owned by Hardy Yu
Last updated: 2023-09-14
3 min read

For the electrical team to get synchronized with other sub-teams without worrying about the progress on the PCB board development, a prototyping board is made for the working-in-progress tracking antenna testing purpose.

The prototyping board is made by soldering a few connectors on a perf board with its corresponding pin from a Nucleo L5. This document will mainly give instructions on how to power it and give firmware people the idea of the connectivity mapping on this board.

Power

The prototyping board has a TX60 connector which is directly connected to the 5V pin of the Nucleo board and the power pin of the headers and connectors on the perf board. Therefore no power source larger than 5V should be connected the to TX60 connector. The recommended way of using it is to connect a 6S-3S to 5V Bucker converter to the TX60 to step down the voltage from the lipo battery.

For people who is working the firmware of tracking antenna, the nucleo board has the option of switch the position of a certain jumper to select the power source for the nucleo board. When the nucleo is not connected to a external power, the jumper should be on the USB power header. When powered with the external power, the jumper should be on the External 5V header to make sure the board operators normally.

Connectors

Servo Connectors - Servos

There are two servo connectors meant to be connected to the servos that rotate the yaw and pitch axes of the tracking antenna. They are connected to the Timer 1 channel 1 and Timer 1 channel 2 of the Nucleo.

URAT2 - TBS M8

A special harness wire that can be directly plugged with the TBS M8 GPS is connected to the UART2 on the Nucleo board.

I2C2 - BMX160

A header that is compatible with the BMX160 sensor is mounted on the board. People can use the position of the resistors (they are the pull-up resistors of the data lines) to figure out the correct orientation to place the sensor.

UART1 - Telemetry Receiver

One important module that is part of the tracking functionality of the antenna is the ability to receive the telemetry data that consists of the GPS information from the drone. The four-pin header connected to UART2 is reserved for the telemetry receiver device that will be mounted to this system, though the specific device is not determined yet (might be XBee). The orientation of the placement is labeled on the header (GRTV - Ground RX TX Power).