Electronics board well under way

After a few weeks of designing, laying out, re-designing, re-laying out and testing, I now have what I think is close to the final lay out for my electronics board. My aim was to get just about all electronics that don’t go in the dome to fit onto one, compact board that can be removed easily when needed and to also keep wiring to a minimum. I started out by measuring all of the parts that were going to live on the board and making templates of them. Then I played around with their location in relation to each other. Once I was happy with where they needed to stay, I printed out a full scale template and sat the mylar board on top of it. Because the mylar is clear, it was easy to trace out the exact location of the mounting holes. Most of the components sit on small nylon stand-offs. When you build enough PCs, you end up with a stack of spare mounting hardware, so I put some of it to good use. The stand-offs are those used to mount motherboards to PC cases.

For the speed controllers, I’m going to use metal stand-offs instead, but for now, they’re just surface mounted to the board. Mounting the VMusic2 player was the trickiest bit because the cable it came with was pretty small. I made up a small mounting cradle for it out of 3mm styrene off cuts which gave access to the headphone and USB ports on the front.

An audio lead was needed to get the sound from the VMusic2 player to the amp, so I made up a small lead which fed from the headphone jack. Ideally, I would have made one that fed from the three pin header on the back of the unit, but I couldn’t find a plug small enough.

Once it was all together, I gave it some power to test if everything worked. Some bad noise came from the speakers, but there was no magic smoke, so that was a good thing. Running an extra cable from the fuse block to the controller board as an earth got rid of the unwanted noise and all was looking well. A quick tidy up of the wiring and it’s just about done.

All that’s left is to wire up the main motor controller and mount the connectors that will attach to the slip ring, battery, motor cables and speakers and then it’s ready to mount inside R2. I’ll need some better speakers, but for testing purposes, the ones I got off eBay for $2 are doing a brilliant job. Actually, they’re pretty crap and will likely end up in the bin, but they’re making sound and aren’t getting in the way which is all I’m asking of them.