Author ELECTRONOOBS
10/07/2019
Remember version 2 of this PCB? I've redesigned the board in order to get better results. In this post we can see the main changes I've made to the PCB. First of all the size is a lot smaller than the old version 2. But in order to make the PCB smaller I had to remove a few components. For example, the chip will be programmed just once after we know that the code works. So there is no need for an USB connecter as the old board had. Also, if there is no USB programming, we don't need the FTDI programer neither. So that just made possible a smaller PCB.

At the same time, the new code that I've implemented won't need a buzzer. Thus new code could create sounds using the brushless motor as a speaker so in this way I was able to remove the buzzer and have more space.

Here we can see the PCB with all the components soldered. On the top side we haev the ATmega328 microcontroller that will control everything. We can see 3 wires, black, red and green. Those are for the PWM input for the speed control. We also have 3 drivers for the 6 MSOFETs on the bottom side of the PCB. These are dual drivers. On the bottom part we can see the MSOFET triple phase bridge and also a small IC and a coil. This is a buck convertet in order to lower the voltage from 24V to 5V for the digital part.

In order to save space, this board doesn't have pads fot the A, B and C outputs. Instead, the output wires are soldered directly to the drain of the MOSFETS and by that save some space and make it more compact. At the input we have a big capacitor in order to smooth the input signal.

Here we can see the old version 2 in the middle with red color solder mask. On the right we have a commercial ESC from ebay and on the left is my new V3 PCb with black soldermask. I'll try to make a better size and maybe add an encoder to this pcb. See full tutorial about this here. I hope it will help you understand more about ESCs.

Apart this post, if you have your own project and you need good quality PCBs, consider using the services of JLCPCB.com which will offer you quite good services, I use their services a lot of my PCBs.

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