This Monday, CalSol received a second run of PCBs! We would like to thank Advanced Circuits for their continued generous support of the Impulse project.
The new boards are a revision of the system we successfully prototyped at end of last semester with numerous improvements, bug fixes and additions. We added PCBs for brake lights and turn signals, as well as finalized the design of our custom racking system. This will allow for hot-swapping of PCBs and as well as easy access to the boards for debugging purposes, something CalSol decided would be very useful after past experiences with GoldRush.
We just spent five hours on Tuesday soldering components onto the boards. The PCBs for lights are fully assembled and working, and most other boards are more than halfway done. The PCBs slide easily into their enclosure and fit snugly. You can see more pictures of our work in the image gallery. After a second round of buying components and another long session of soldering, we’ll have all the boards built and ready for testing. This will be a huge milestone in the construction of Impulse.