MRover · Michigan Mars Rover · Since September 2025
The power distribution board supplies the rover’s subsystems with multiple voltage levels. My work spans assembly and testing of prior hardware, and collaboration on a new design that is awaiting delivery.
01
Different rover subsystems need different supply voltages. The PDB brings those power outputs together in a system that the team can assemble, test, and maintain.
I prepared spare boards, assembled and soldered daughtercards and the motherboard, and contributed to testing and debugging.
02
Last year, the team replaced one large board with a motherboard-and-daughtercard architecture. It improves access and allows a failed daughtercard to be replaced with a matching spare.
The goal is to continue competition without replacing the whole board. Preparing spares was an important part of my contribution; I also collaborated with an experienced lead on the PDB layout in Altium.
03
During testing of the 18 V daughtercard, I observed excessive heating in the high-side MOSFET. Schedule constraints prevented us from resolving it.
I suspected an issue with bootstrap capacitance, but the cause was not confirmed. For this year’s design, the team added heat pads and recalculated the required capacitance.
The new board has not arrived. Those changes remain an untested design response, with no validation data or confirmed improvement yet.
The motherboard’s STM32 microcontroller is designed to monitor current across the rover’s power outputs, communicate over CAN, and control status lights.