EE Report

Owned by Egor Gorelyy
Last updated: 2023-02-13 by Rahul Ramkumar
4 min read

The following report will be consist of the requirements of the Tracking Antenna project, more specifically highlight important requirements for the Elctrical Subteam. To begin, the overview and purpose of this project will be stated. Next, will be a detailed outline of all the components and their role to teh finished project. Finally, there will be a detailed list of the requirements the electrical subteam needs to complete.

The overall purpose of the tracking antena project is to construct a groundside hardware system whose pupose is to track the drone’s movement in the air. This will be done through rotation in yaw and pitch of the antenna head. There will be two antenna towers. We are planning to have each tower be a tripod which can be folded up and transported to the competition in a case and then needs to be assembled easily on the day of.

 

Definitions:

Panning Arm → The antenna arm that rotates and aims at the drone

Tower Body → Part of the antenna tower that does not rotate

GS → Ground Station

 

Video Tower [add images of antennas later]

  • X-Air 1.3 antenna mounted on the panning arm [152mm x 152mm x 30mm] [135 g]

    • Connector:

      • SMA Male

  • BMX 160 IMU mounted on the panning arm [20 x 12.5 mm]

    • Allows us to know where the panning arm is pointing at any given time and adjust

    • Power Supply Range: 1.71 V - 3.6 V

  • Neo M8 GPS will be mounted on the tower body

    • Allows us to get the position of the tower and compare with the position of the drone

    • Max: 3.6V

  • Nucleo F401 MCU on the on the tower body [82.5 x 70 x ?mm]

    • Controls everything and carries out communication with GSP

    • Connectors:

      • USB Type-C®, Micro-B, or Mini-B connector for the ST-LINK

      • USB Type-C® user connector

      • MIPI® debug connector

  • AKK 5.8 GHZ Video Transmitter

    • Rebroadcasts the video to different places nearby

  • RMRC 1.3 GHZ video receiver connected with cable and located in the Ground Station enclosure [50 x 25.7 x 8.3mm]

    • Connector:

      • SMA Female

 

Telemetry Tower

  • Singularity 868 antenna mounted on the panning arm [65mm x xxmm + 90mm cable]

    • Connector:

      • SMA

  • X-Air 900 omnidirectional antenna mounted on the tower body [222mm x 222mm x 45mm] [324 g]

    • Signal will be received from it within a certain range to allow the 868 antenna to rotate easily

    • Connector:

      • SMA male

  • BMX 160 IMU mounted on the panning arm [20 x 12.5 mm]

    • Allows us to know where the panning arm is pointing at any given time and adjust

    • Power Supply Range: 1.71 V - 3.6 V

  • Neo M8 GPS will be mounted on the tower body

    • Allows us to get the position of the tower and compare with the position of the drone

    • Max: 3.6V

  • Nucleo F401 MCU on the tower body [82.5 x 70 x ?mm] [50g]

    • Controls everything and carries out communication with GSPC

    • Connectors:

      • USB Type-C®, Micro-B, or Mini-B connector for the ST-LINK

      • USB Type-C® user connector

      • MIPI® debug connector

  • RFD900x connected with cable and located in the Ground Station enclosure

    • Power Supply: 5V (Ideally)

    • RF : 2 x RP-SMA antenna connectors

  • TBS Tracer 2.4ghz beside RFD900x in the Ground Station enclosure enclosure

 

Simple Diagram of Tracking Antenna System

Electrical Requirements:

  • Design a system where one continous rotation servo motor controls multiple 360 degrees of rotation in the yaw axis and another servo controls pitch rotation from 20 to 90 degrees

    • If the servos, IMU, and antennas can be wired in a way where we can rotate as much as we want in yaw and cable length won’t be a problem that would be good. Otherwise a minimum of 5 rotations before the system is limited by cable length are required.

    • The continous rotation servo motor used to control yaw needs to meet a speed of 0.3889 rad/s or 3.7136 rpm or 22.3 degrees/s

    • There is no specific requirement for the pitch continous rotation servo motor but using the same one as for yaw would simplify things

    • The panning antenna arm must have a max error on any angle of +/- 15 degrees but it would be best if the servo had a safety margin

  • Design a power delievery system that converts the voltage from the source to 1.7V to 3.6V and allows the team to set up the antenna on the day of the competetion.

    • On day of competetion minimal cables should be required to be plugged in. Only usb connections and one main plug into outlet; no jumper cable connections

  • Minimum cable length for components placed on panning arm should be able to rotate 5 rotations before being rotation is restricted.

  • The flow of the elctrical components is that a power supply volatge (120V) must come in from a source and enter the black box witha supply volatge of 3.6V which houses components - Nucleo board, IMU .

    • Another option is for all components to be weatherproofed; howver power entering the nucleo board must be a maximm of 3.6V.

  • Power converter may be required to convert 120V AC to 5V DC (E.g.https://www.aliexpress.com/i/1005003999757318.html)

 

Budget