The design of STARLIGHT represents a massive leap in my technical ability, and a huge milestone overall. However, I didn’t start from nothing. You may wonder what prompted me to begin designing my first circuit board?
The beginning of STARLIGHT
It all goes back to December of 2022, during a vacation to Oklahoma to visit family. I acutely remember almost every detail of the moment when I decided to begin working on this as a project. STARLIGHT didn’t start as a rocket control board. Originally, it was just going to be a single thrust vector control rocket that I would build and launch to impress friends and family. During this family trip, I began designing parts, doing research, and purchasing components required for a model rocket build. The first phase of the engineering process lasted about three months.
Things start picking up
Then, in March of 2023, I was really starting to get all the groundwork ready for Horizon I (I had renamed the rocket Horizon), and I realized something incredibly important – I needed a control board for my rocket! For most model rockets, electronics are not necessary. Usually, you can just strap an engine to it and use passive stabilization with fins or other aerodynamic components to stabilize it. But unlike most model rockets, I wanted mine to be fancy and utilize active stabilization, which requires the use of electronics as the “brain” of the rocket.
This was probably the biggest roadblock of the project. How was I going to be able to find a control board with everything exactly as I needed it? The answer to this question, it turned out, was to take matters into my own hands.
This was when I began my work designing my own circuit board for my model rocket. I named it STARLIGHT (I had renamed the rocket itself, but the control board remained as STARLIGHT), chose parts for it, and spent about 3 to 4 weeks simply designing the board’s schematic. Once I had the schematic all set, I spent another 3 weeks on board layout. This was a long and tedious process, but it paid off in the end.
Manufacturing the boards
Once I had the schematic and the layout all set, it was time to get the boards manufactured and test them out. After many frustrating hours trying to get the boards manufactured by the PCB manufacturing company JLCPCB, I finally placed my order on May 27, 2023. Now, all I could do was wait.
In the meantime, I began fleshing out the other aspects of Horizon I. I wrote an entire article on Horizon, if you want to take a look. Luckily, the boards didn’t take long to arrive. In fact, they arrived on my front doorstep 2 weeks after I placed the order, and they were ready to be plugged in.
The end result
This was possibly the most nervewracking part of the entire ordeal: I was about to find out whether my 6 months of work were for naught. Had I wasted half a year on a circuit board that would burn up the moment I plugged it into my computer? Would this really be the end of my dream?
The answer to that question, happily, is no. As I plugged the board in, the red indicator LED on the board flashed to life! This proved that the on-board voltage regulators were OK. A few seconds later, the microcontroller on the board popped up on my computer, allowing me access to the board’s file system. It had worked! After 6 months of painstaking hard work, I had designed a board that worked. And it worked beautifully.
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