LEA Control Board

The LEA Control Board (LCB) is a construction kit to provide power electronic converters with a control board.

The basic module is the control board (LCB-CCB) itself. It contains a powerful dual-core processor, error latches and various predefined low-pass filters to respond to input signals. An XDS100v2 debugger is directly integrated on the board.

The docking board (LCB-CDB) is suitable for initial operation. This contains various input options (switches, buttons, potentiometers) as well as LEDs for output.

The external hardware monitor (LCB-CHW) is for viewing internal counter variables on the oscilloscope and is mainly used for troubleshooting the control board in the overall system (control board + power converter).

The pin board (LCB-CPB) is for in-circuit signal measurments by an external scope on certain pins. The test board (LCB-CTB) was developed to check all pins, PWM signals, ADCs and DACs for functionality after a new board has been completed (end of line test).

PCB overview

This is the main repository of the LEA Control Board (LCB) project. Due to correct PCB versioning, every single PCB is in its own repository.

• LCB-CDB-01_Dock_Board
• LCB-CHW-01_Hardware_Monitor
• LCB-ADA-01_Adapter_Board
• LCB-CPB-01_Pin_Board
• LCB-CTB-01_Test_Board
• LCB-CBB-01_Bus_Board

Symbols, footprints and 3D-models can be found in the LEA KiCad Library.

Due initially wrong selected comparators (no rail-to-rail), the comparator adapter board LCB-ADA-01 was introduced to replace the comparator.

PCB versioning

Example LCB-CCB-01-1.0.5:

• First three letters LCB: Parent project name LEA Control Board
• Second three letters CCB: PCB name Control Board
• Number 01: PCB size. For future use in case of several PCB sizes
• First version number 1: Major version, increases for incompatible changes
• Second number 0: PCB release, increases for improved layouts
• Third number 5: Schematic version, increases for component changes, but no layout changes

Kicad Options

To open the LEA Control Board files, KiCad 8 needs to be used. Make sure that you run the latest version of KiCad.

Downloading this project and folder structure

To use this project, LEA KiCad symbols, footprints and 3D-models need to be included. Note, that both folders need to be in the same direction.

Clone the symbols, footprints and 3D-models:

git clone https://github.com/upb-lea/LEA_KiCad_Library.git

Clone this project:

https://github.com/upb-lea/LCB-CCB-01_LEA_Control_Board.git

If you are downloading the .zip-files manually, unpack them in the same direction.

Symbol library and footprint libary

The libraries are included by default, if the above mentioned folder structure was considered. Open Kicad, load one of the projects and see the libraries:

• symbol editor -> Search for LEA_Symbol_Library
• footprint editor -> Search for LEA_Footprint_Library

Set environment variable for 3D models:

Please refer to this section.

Software

Various software examples using the LEA Control Board is available and can be found in this repository. There are examples for using the hardware monitor, SPI, UART and many others.