During my co-op at Nuvation, employees would get together after work at build different things together. I got involved with Nuvation’s burning man structure, the Techno Gecko. After being in storage during COVID it was time to bring it back out.
Due to privacy concerns, the electrical schematics of the project cannot be shown.
The structure was originally controlled by a steering wheel that was located on the structure itself. However, this led to the issue of passengers asking to drive and distracting the driver. Hence, it was decided to make the wheels of the structure remote controlled to mitigate this problem.
This project is a modification to an existing project (the Techno Gecko). Furthermore, I worked within a team to complete this task. My role on the team was to implement the electrical schematics into Altium (used for PCB design) and then solder the electronic components onto the produced PCB’s.
My process to complete this project was:
First, space for the new addition needed to be made on the existing PCB. To do that margins were made closer and components were rearranged all over the board. Due to the addition of higher voltage components, the PCB had to be split into different regions for different voltage components.
Once the electrical schematics for the RF communication was completed by my team members, I added in the chosen components (in the squared section) to the Altium design as seen in the picture below.
The boards were then ordered and needed all of the electronic components soldered onto them including the parts that were designed by me. Four of these boards were soldered, with one for each wheel of the structure.
The board is seen in the picture below with the section I designed squared in.
