Power Control Board v2 Design Complete
v2 of the power control board has been completed! The boards have been ordered and should arrive in a week or two. This version ended up doing a lot to refine the v1 design, and had some core architecture changes. The big difference is that this time I swapped the L293 chip for individual transistors (BJTs because why not). Along with that came some supporting components to correctly drive the BJTs, as well as diodes to prevent the reverse biasing which has become my nemesis on this project. In addition to that I added a time delay feature on the cutoff circuit to provide ~200ms of debounce and avoid erroneous trips. I added even more pull-down resistors to keep things safe, as well as removed a few optional components which I determined weren't necesesary. And of course the biggest change, a new silkscreen graphic on the back! You'll have to wait until the boards arrive to see that. I also wanted to test out doing the front graphics as ground traces instead of silkscreen, because it will be shiny (although I didn't pay the extra for gold plating). So in all theres not many functional changes but lots of things to make the board more robust. Now time to take a break from PCB design for a while and work on some other unrelated projects.