Potential Test Stand Control Board Updates & Improvements
Here's a list of improvements/issues with the test stand control board designed by the May 2022 MicroCART team. If you want to do some PCB design/firmware stuff, start here:
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Update schematic & PCB to support both orientations of the 5 pin MA3 connector cable - I didn't really notice that the 5 pin connector used by the MA3 encoder cable can work in both orientations if you have the PCB wired properly. This should be a quick and simple update, just edit the schematic and connect pins 1 & 5 of component J1 to GND, and pins 2 & 4 to 5v, then update the PCB to support the change.
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Add a physical switch to switch between position and rate mode - The current iteration of the PCB & firmware supports switching between rate & position mode with a long press of the pushbutton, and indicates the current state with one of the Nano's builtin LEDs. I would've liked to have a dedicated slider switch to change between the modes, and potentially a dedicated LED to indicate which of the two modes the PCB is in. This would also require updating the firmware, although it should be a simple update, and would probably reduce the firmware size too (not that that was ever an issue)
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Complete test stand control board overhaul - While the current test stand control board works just fine, something I always wanted to do was to redesign it with a form factor closer to the Crazyflie radio, using a discrete uC instead of a dev board like the Nano.
- Part of the reason I never got around to doing this was due to the chip shortage, but I did get something together on my personal Github: https://github.com/RSchneyer/test_stand_smd_design
- Some of the chips I considered/would consider using: ATMega 328, SAMD21, RP2040, CH559
- You'll want to find a chip with at least a 10b ADC, since the control board needs precision to at least 1 degree.
- One concern I had when looking at chips was that the MA3 is designed to use 5v, but most uCs use 3.3v. After some very brief testing, I think you might be able to run it of 3.3v and get back good data just fine (but you might want to do more testing yourself)