Tracking Antenna Nucleo Shield Arch

Owned by Hardy Yu
Last updated: 2023-07-13
3 min read

The EE members who are delegated to designing the tracking antenna PCB task decided to make a Nucleo shield that incorporates Nucleo L552ZE-Q. The baseline of the design is to provide a reliable power supply to all the electronic components that can be mounted to the tracking antenna tower and provide an easy-to-use harness for the electronic peripherals.

Nucleo Shield Idea
Nucleo L552ZE-Q

 

Features:

  1. Reverse polarity protection

  2. Overcurrent protection

  3. Input voltage monitoring

  4. 12V Buck - for VTX system

  5. 5V Buck - powering up Nucleo and servos

  6. Nucleo connection socket

  7. Grouped pinout for peripherals

  8. LED state indication

Block Diagram:

 

Thoughts on the Implementations:

  • We switch back our idea of making the shield of f401 to l5 because of the lack of nulceo in bay

  • Inverse Polarity protection is needed because we don’t want to reverse-connect all the valuable components and blow them up

  • Voltage sensing on the battery. Keep on track of the battery level and terminates the current draw when the battery is too low

  • Different battery needs different battery monitor configuration. These can be done by changing the configuration for the firmware or adding a physical switch. Nevertheless, we can also add a balance port like a battery checker. I lean towards only making the pcb connect to 6s battery for now.

  • Current sensing on how much current was drawn from each buch, don’t know if this is actually useful

  • LED lights can indicate if the power is connected. If the Nucleo is detected, etc.

  • The interface between Nucleo and the shield is tricky because on the back of the Nucleo there are two different groups of pinouts. There are already soldered pins and unsoldered holes. We want to connect the shield to the unsoldered holes somehow because soldered pins aren’t compatible with the complete features of the nucleo.

  • SD card slot can be implemented on the board because it can be useful when we want to record the gps data for example in the future.

  • The nucleo will be powered up through 5V_EXT

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