onehorse
Well-known member
I just though I would show off my latest creation. It is designed to be a Teensy (K20)-based motor controller specifically for UAVs. Here is the "bottom":

and this is the "top":

The Teensy is on the bottom along with a 5 V boost converter to provide 5 V for the R/C radio and a 3.3 V LDO to provide power to the rest of the board. In use the board will be powered by a single-cell LiPo battery. The diodes, 5 V boost converter and LDO are all sized to provide a maximum of 450 mA of current even though the draw is likely to be much less than 50 mA at all times.
The top of the board has an rgb led, an EM7180 sensor hub as master to a slave MPU9250 IMU and a slave BMP280 altimeter, and brushed DC motor drive circuitry.
The board has I2C, SPI, UART and 5 PWM pins broken out. The ports are useful for diagnostics and to add additional sensors or radios, and the PWMs for the R/C radio and to drive brushless motors without a design change.
In fact, the board is surprisingly general purpose since the motor driver and inertial navigation functions as well as the available ports for expansion allow it to serve a variety of applications. I am trying to get my son interested in using the board as a replacement for his Sparkfun RedBot controller, for example.
A previous version of this board was successfully flown in a quadcopter, and I expect to fly this one soon too.
I have no plans to make this available for sale at Tindie, but the design is posted on the share space at OSH Park for anyone to use as they will.
I made similar flight controllers based on the nRF51822 and ESP8266. The latter seems the most promising for a small, inexpensive UAV control board with embedded connectivity.
I really should thank Phil Schuster, whose design I started with and heavily modified. Some aspects of his design survived in the "final" product.
Also thanks to Constantine for providing the bootloader footprints, even though I misused them at first.
And thanks to Paul for making the schematics available and for creating the Teensy all in the first place.
Despite the tremendous help I received by these people and others on this forum, any mistakes in the above design are mine; if you find some please tell me.

and this is the "top":

The Teensy is on the bottom along with a 5 V boost converter to provide 5 V for the R/C radio and a 3.3 V LDO to provide power to the rest of the board. In use the board will be powered by a single-cell LiPo battery. The diodes, 5 V boost converter and LDO are all sized to provide a maximum of 450 mA of current even though the draw is likely to be much less than 50 mA at all times.
The top of the board has an rgb led, an EM7180 sensor hub as master to a slave MPU9250 IMU and a slave BMP280 altimeter, and brushed DC motor drive circuitry.
The board has I2C, SPI, UART and 5 PWM pins broken out. The ports are useful for diagnostics and to add additional sensors or radios, and the PWMs for the R/C radio and to drive brushless motors without a design change.
In fact, the board is surprisingly general purpose since the motor driver and inertial navigation functions as well as the available ports for expansion allow it to serve a variety of applications. I am trying to get my son interested in using the board as a replacement for his Sparkfun RedBot controller, for example.
A previous version of this board was successfully flown in a quadcopter, and I expect to fly this one soon too.
I have no plans to make this available for sale at Tindie, but the design is posted on the share space at OSH Park for anyone to use as they will.
I made similar flight controllers based on the nRF51822 and ESP8266. The latter seems the most promising for a small, inexpensive UAV control board with embedded connectivity.
I really should thank Phil Schuster, whose design I started with and heavily modified. Some aspects of his design survived in the "final" product.
Also thanks to Constantine for providing the bootloader footprints, even though I misused them at first.
And thanks to Paul for making the schematics available and for creating the Teensy all in the first place.
Despite the tremendous help I received by these people and others on this forum, any mistakes in the above design are mine; if you find some please tell me.
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