2025-03-27 Electrical Meeting

2025-03-27 Electrical Meeting

Agenda

Attendance

In person

Online

In person

Online

@Kenny Na

@Ryan Scomazzon

@Santosh Erathasari

@Jeremy Poulin

@Ernest James Ramas

@Kaleb Lacroix

@Daniel Rolinsky

@Megan Lee

@Meghan Dang

@Andrew Chai

@Arsalan Nasrifar

@Timothy Trinh

@Ian Van Den Steen

@Tim Gu

@Ian Van Den Steen

@Himansh Garg

@Ahmed Osman

@Thuvaragan Prathifkumar

@Aly Ahmed

General Updates

  • @Kenny Na running this EE meeting! :poggers:

  • When is our last meeting?

    • When do y’all have exams

    • MME has exams starting the 9th making next week the last one but we can still run it if everyone else is later.

    • SYDE 2A & EE 2A finals start on the 10th

    • Next meeting is the last one

  • Workseshes

  • EE Social Planning?

  • New board order came

  • XT90 soldering tech

    • plug the reciprocal connector in while soldering

    • can prevent connector from deforming in shape

  • New EWaste bin

    • Box in the bay by the ee shelf

    • SDC has an e waste bin that shows up sometimes

  • Epic tip: Opening bags

    • DigiKey bags have convenient tear lines. - They are convenient now, but make your life easier later when you put it in a box and components fall out

    • To open bags, its often better to just poke a hole in the middle of it to take the parts out so that once you put them back in, there is no open edge for pieces to fall out of

    • my finger hurt tho

Flight Tests

  • Last flight test

    • Mar 21st

      • 2025-3-21 Pegasus 2 Task 1 Sim w/ KML messages over MAVLink, Peggy Tuning, Task 2 Practice

      • https://discordapp.com/channels/776618956638388305/1350642379853660263

      • Peggy 2 Tuning & IR camera test

      • Foam Plane Pilot Training

        • Foam plane flew!… the first time…

        • Miscommunication on the second flight test caused a crash RIP

      • Houston tuning

        • RIP Houston

          • image-20250327-162659.png
        • Motor fell off during flight, causing it to crash with significant damages

        • The motor was not bolted at enough points to the chassis

        • Most components are recoverable

        • Pre-flight checks should be improved to prevent this in the future

    • Cali drone flight test

  • Next flight test

Reminders

  • Put boards from your board order on the GitHub

  • Put batteries away (Problematic LiHv)

  • Use LCSC components on new boards (Ideally from the JLC library) for PnP

  • Make sure to clean up after yourself

    • TURN OFF DMMs WHEN DONE please!

  • Don’t forget to fill out the team roster: https://forms.office.com/r/ka0MJHJQ9D

  • Get the electronsite role if on site - reach out to @Ryan Scomazzon if you have issues

  • More meetings! AEAC is soon.

    • Competition Syncs: Mondays at 9pm

    • Eclipse Syncs: Tuesdays at 8pm

  • Reach out if you need help on a project or bootcamp

  • Recruit your friends!

    • If you like the team, then we can do even more with more people!

  • BEWARE OF SCAMS ⚠️

  • Ask for reviews on boards

    • If it has a microcontroller, ask EFS to review too

 

Pegasus/Competition Updates

2025-03-24 Competition Architecture Sync

  • Task 1: Drone Swarm (IR Beacon/Fire Detection)

    • Houston and California drone flying (potentially Peggy if better images)

    • X500 airframe is OK to use for AEAC given we aren’t ripping COTS avionics!

      • Convo: 2025-03-26 AEAC Townhall #2

      • This means we will need the additional RPi Interface HATs for sure

        • Finish assembling Rev. C (Competition 2025) ASAP

    • Cali and X500 drones need a name

  • Task 2 (Water Delivery):

    • Mech tasks were assigned to mount 6x new pumps for new drones

    • Water Controller PCBs will have to be mounted and wired afterwards

      • Will be mounted first week of april. Hopefully we can wire before exams? Coop gamer ball?

  • Logistics:

    • Battery transporting has been figured out

      • To be shipped straight to AEAC (Medicine Hat, AB)

      • Orders (to be?) placed for them ASAP

Eclipse Updates

2025-03-18 Eclipse Arch Sync - Meetings - WARG

@Jerry Tian @Manasva Katyal

  • SSD was fixed, wing harness assembly almost finished

  • Any more work to be done here?

  • Thanks for everyone who helped with this so far

  • Come to Eclipse Maiden Flight!

    • Super exciting

    • We’ve been working really hard on this

    • Aiming for April 4th, 2025 Flight Test

    • Will be one of the most exciting flight tests of the term!

    • Might be delayed due to mech not having enough wrap for the wings and bad weather this weekend.

 

Project Updates

Pick & Place Machine @Santosh Erathasari

  • been researching and reading documentation

  • Started setting up the machine and testing PCB alignment

  • Will continue to research and figure out

  • Most feeders were working except 30

 

PDB @Andrew Chai @Kenny Na @Megan Lee @Santosh Erathasari

  • Power Distribution Board (PDB) - Unarchived - Electrical - WARG

  • 12S → 5V, 12S → 12V schematics are a WIP

  • @Kenny Na Finished selecting a Hall IC for current sensing. Added 2x temperature and 1x bus voltage sensors, only thing that may cause an issue is if we use too many of the STM’s pins. These sensors need 4x analog INs (or extra MOSFETs for switching between may be needed).

  • @Andrew Chai Adding an EFUSE circuit for OCP

  • SMPS design for 5V pretty much done it seems, 12V 95% done, 3V3 in progress

    • Just some final checks for 5V

  • Layout very soon

    • Meet on weekend?? → aim to have schem done by then?

  • New meeting

    • This weekend?

    • This sat works better for @Megan Lee

  • Can shift around GPIOs a bit

 

BMS @Sam Zhang @Chenxuan Yuan @Arsalan Nasrifar @Andrew Chai

  • Cell Monitor - Electrical - WARG

  • Custom Battery Pack

  • Working on schematics

  • Chenxuan and I (Arsalan) had a call on Sunday:

    • Chenxuan is working on the IC schematic

    • I (Arsalan) am working on the battery pack schematic (won’t take long) and then I will join Chenxuan in doing the IC schematic

  • Lipo 6200mAh

  • 12S 2P

  • 400g lighter than what is in the drone

  • Gives access to every cell

 

3S ESC @Kenny Na

  • Reviews appreciated!

  • Routing progress being made

  • @Derek Tang to look at STM design from an EFS side

    • Updates?

 

Tracking Antenna Controller + ELRS Gemini Tx @Ahmed Osman@Nolan Haines

  • no progress yet waiting for @Derek Tang to test the board or someone from efs who knows how to test the board

 

https://uwarg-docs.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EL/pages/2771484676 @Ishman Mann

  • Board is ready for 1st schematic review, please take a look

  • It is only able to TX, not RX. Bidirectionally would cost more components/complexity

 

12V Input to 65W USB-PD Source - Electrical - WARG @Ian Van Den Steen

  • Rough layout finished

  • Simulation done

  • Needs reviews

 

12V to 24V Boost Groundside Converter - Electrical - WARG @Tim Gu@Daniel Rolinsky @Himansh Garg @Thuvaragan Prathifkumar

 

LED Board Rev. 4 Assembly

  • EFS leads each assembled one side of an LED board :poggers:

  • Can try and finish assembling these at the next two work sessions or so (blocked by Pi Interface)

 

https://uwarg-docs.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EL/pages/2506883090 @Kenny Na @Derek Tang

  • Pending architecture meeting in the summer

    • Discussed architecture briefly with in Discord: https://discordapp.com/channels/776618956638388305/779158507034771456/1352551664632070145

    • Pixhawks have essentially 2 sections: bottom-side with connectors for harnessing, power electronics, and then modular top module that contains the microcontroller/processor

    • Could we do the same design, except a Pi CM5 or NVIDIA Orin with an STM32H7 on the side?

      • Allows for compute-intensive tasks (e.g. CNN, ViT, GPT) while retaining separate RTOS on STM32

      • VI-SLAM/3D reconstruction needed onboard specifically? Is this something worth building?

    • Only a point in designing this if it can be unique vs. COTS boards (high level of integration)

 

Sensor Cluster - Electrical - WARG @Michael Botros

  • Stalled until someone is able to drive it (@Megan Lee interested after getting more experience)

 

https://uwarg-docs.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/EL/pages/2782593034@Robert Tang @Kevin Li

  • Higher priority things to work on

 

Open Tasks

  • Power bank research and order for Pinecil

Action Items

SOCIALLLLLLL