Designing Printed Circuit Boards for Drones

Altium Designer EAGLE Circuit Design STM32

Custom Flight Controller

A custom flight controller PCB designed from scratch featuring an STM32 ARM microcontroller with interfaces for gyroscope, GPS, PWM motor outputs, USB, and various sensor buses (I2C, SPI). PX4 autopilot was ported to the board. This was an introduction to circuit design and working with the STM32 hardware abstraction layer (HAL).

Assembled custom flight controller PCB with STM32 MCU Custom flight controller PCB Custom flight controller PCB Flight controller PCB layout in EAGLE

Wheatstone Bridge Strain Gauge Board

A custom Wheatstone bridge PCB designed to add strain gauges to each arm of a quadrotor drone. This allowed isolating motor thrust from other external forces measured by the IMU, enabling in flight motor failure isolation and thrust estimation.

Custom Wheatstone bridge PCB wired to carbon fiber drone frame Assembled Wheatstone bridge board in hand Strain gauge Wheatstone bridge schematic Strain gauge PCB layout