Board to board communication and power supply

Three weeks ago a prototype of the power supply board was milled at NTNU, and the last few days it has been tested thoroughly.

Picture 1: Power supply prototype

The microcontroller software is pretty much finished, and board-to-board communication has been successfully tested with another microcontroller running as an I2C-master, as can bee seen in the picture below. More specifically, the power supply will send information about voltage levels and current draw to the main board, which in turn will be sent down to the ground station and displayed on a monitor.

Picture 2: Successful test of communication between PSU
prototype and I2C-master on breadboard

It all seems to work well, although it needs some serious testing over long durations before it is considered stable. The heat dissapation has been tested under maximum loads, and the temperature seems to be within an acceptable range.

Professional PCBs are being made in China right now, so the prototype seen in the pictures above will be replaced in near future. The final PCB layout can be seen below:

Picture 3: Final PCB layout

Stay tuned!