Soldering the Flight Control

See the Mounting page for where each part goes.

Warning: The pictures below show the 0.21 board, not the most recent 0.22 version!

Blank Boards

Populating

Some minutes later your PCB will look like this:

equip smaller parts first and work on to the larger ones like connectors and switches...

the last parts should be the connectors.. if you use the SMD-Iron for them you may have to turn it up a little. Around 420°C will be okay for the pins

again, take your time, don't go crazy! if you make a mistake here your copter could fall out of the sky!

HIGH resolution images

click on the images below to get high resolution images ( large, 4MB each)

Testing

After soldering, you should check neighboring pins of the smaller ICs for shortcuts. Just test each pin with its immediate neighbor to see if you have a shortcut. Note that some have capacitors behind them, making them shortcut for a short while (less than a 10th of a second, usually) - that's nothing to worry about.

Here's a list of ICs and what you should find in your tests:

• IC1 (ATMEGA644): Shortcut between 6-18-28-39 and 5-17-27-29-38

• IC4 (P82B96): Shortcut between 2-3 and 5-6

• IC5 (P82B96): Shortcut between 2-3 and 5-6

• IC10 (74LVC32): Shortcut between 2-5-10-13
• U100 (MAX3002): Shortcut between 10-19

If you want to test your flight control, check that you have no shortcuts between the power-planes for GND, 3.3V, 5V and 12V. Then you can powerup the FC using the battery-connector and the ON button.

Both outer pins of the battery-connector are ground, the middle pin is the positive pin at battery-voltage (12V).

The pinout of the X-PS connector is:

On the SB, only GND and 12V of the X-PS are used.