Building the Magpie Drone Power Distribution Board v1.1

The design & construction of a Nano 33 BLE version.

Figure 1. 3D Rendering of the Magpie Drone PDB PCB.

The Reefwing team is designing their own drone to be used for STEM training. The drone will be controlled by an Arduino Nano 33 BLE or an Arduino Portenta H7 (i.e. the Mbed OS based Arduino cores).

How to Write your own Flight Controller Software — Part 11

There is some additional hardware and interfacing requirements which we have spoken about in part 2 of our article on Writing your own Flight Controller Software. Our Power Distribution Board (PDB), makes it easy to include these in our drone build. Note that there are two different PDB’s for the Nano 33 BLE and the Portenta H7 because they use different header configurations (Portenta uses the MKR form factor and the Nano uses the Nano form factor). This article describes the construction of the Nano 33 BLE version.

Figure 2. Power Distribution Board Schematic.