Power Control Board PCB

After many hours of tweaking, optimizing and getting a little out of hand with graphics, the PCBs have been completed for the power controller and have been sent to fab. Expecting a few weeks for them to be made and shipped across the pacific. Once they arrive an example will be assembled and throughly tested. If all goes well it should be installed in the plane in the beginning of April. Now that this is out of the way I'm off on vacation for a week. If things go smoothly with testing I plan to revisit the audio control boards in the next month or two, with more circuits to prototype and PCBs to design.

Some renders of the power controller below.

The boards have a variety of useful features that'll be a big upgrade to our current setup. The biggest improvement is the ability to override bus states. You can see lots of header pins on the board which will connect to switches on the front panel of the rack. These allow you to override the sim state and force busses on or off. It also has lots of LEDs to actually indicate what is going on, instead of the guessing method we currently use. You'll notice some doubled up LEDs, that's so you can replace one of them with a pin header and wire up to remote LEDs on the front panel. It's also capable of running on either 5v or 28v DC, with an onboard voltage regulator. The two big blue boxes in the middle are the master control relays, one which sends control power to all the relays, and the other which turns on the master power relays. The last feature worth highlighting is the cutoff loop. This can optionally be run to anywhere in the cockpit, and if the loop is broken it will trip the master relays. This lets us put a kill switch or have additional external checks that need to be happy in order for us to send power to the plane.