I made a breakout board for the DRV5055. I intend on using two of these at 90 degrees to each other as a low cost angle sensing solution. I’ll be paying about $2.5 per board or $5 per axis after shipping, tax, and coupons.
This is my very first actual pcb design so its probably not terribly great. I have pads for a low pass RC filter just in case I want to add one later for some reason. I also have some expose tracks on the bottom that I’ll use to test ideas for increasing current inspired by dekutree64 efforts.
Personally, I would change the solder Jumper JP1 to “normally closed”. In that way there is a configuration where the board is immediately ready to use and you don’t have to solder the jumper to use it.
If you want the RC filter, you’d first break the JP1 connection and then solder the R C parts.
And I’m also not sure about the tracks on the bottom. Given the price of port boards at JLC I’d just design a second board for that, and use the bottom of this one to have a solid ground plane instead.
If you use JLCPBC, the DRV5055 will be upside down for some reason and it will try to add pins to the test points. Uncheck the test points (Quantity of 8) and flip the DRV5055.
You can mark the test points “exclude from BOM” to make them not show up in JLC’s lists.
You can check the orientation settings of the footprint (or flip it in the footprint editor) to fix the orientation issue.
Please post some image files so we can see it easily. Schematic, front/back without silkscreen so all the traces are visible, and with silkscreen so we can see what’s what (a complete 3D model with components is best, if kicad does that)
I thought it was going to be more expensive when I designed it. And since I’ll be exploading traces, I probably should do that. I forget JLC advertises $2 for 5 PCBs…
If the bottom is a solid ground plane and would I also need a vcc plane to cancel out the noise of the spinning magnet?
What’s strange is that Kicad has it the right way round. I’ll mess with it and see if I can fix it easily.
I really should have done that. I’ll post them as soon as I can.
Ah, this is only a hall sensor. When I see DRV I think gate driver The board looks fine to me. Not much way to go wrong on something so simple.
Regarding heavy copper conductors on the back, they do work well, but soldering becomes problematic as the mass and surface area increases. I did 4 Leptons with paste no problem, but when it came to assembling them in a stack with 2mm copper wire connecting them together, my 80W iron struggled. Adding battery wires after that, a 150W gun struggled.
I’ve been working on a 4-in-1 design where they’ll be done all at once with paste. The battery wires will either be connected with lugs and screws, or soldered to the copper bars before soldering the bars to the board so I can use fire.
