Author Andrei
24/04/2019
So guys, a few days ago we have seen the ESC open source board that ELECTRONOOBS made for all us. He then told me he realized a few errors or weak points with the board. That's why he then made a second version with a few modified parts. The components are the same as before but the changes are made with the layout. Why? well, an ESC is a current beast. This board could go up to 30A so we need a good layout for heat dissipation, magnetic noise, etc.

So, let's see what's new with this PCB and why we have to make these small cahnges.

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Here we have the top and bottom layout of this board. By the way, you could see the full tutorial and make your own board like this one, here on this link. We can see on the top layer the 5V regulation buck converter circuit with the coil and the IC. Then on the right side we have the power MOSFETs and the triple phase output. Also, from the left side to the MOSFETs we have thick tracks and these tracks will have to withstand huge currents.

On the bottom side we have the ATmega328 microcontroller, the MOSFET drivers, the PWM input, a buzzer, LEDs and more... We also have the CH340 IC with a USB connector for UART programming of the microcontroller. Maybe this part is a bit overkill since we don't program the chip too often.

So one of the main changes is to expose the big tracks so they could be filled with solder and in that way it could withstand a lot more current without overheating. At the same time, the vias are bigger so those could also get filled with solder. The pin of the buzzer is now a PWM pin since there are no active buzzer this samall, and we need a PWM signal to ring a passive buzzer. Some more connections were corrected for this new better version.

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