Flight Controller Design


The board is not manufacturing-ready yet: there are 29 unrouted connections, generic passives without MPNs, and the routing precheck flags blocked fine-pitch/USB pins. I’m clearing stale routing, re-placing with explicit ESP32 antenna/USB/sensor constraints, then I’ll reroute.
Routing precheck is now clean after correcting the USB/VBUS routing rules and USB pair classification. I’m starting full-board routing now.
I made substantial progress, but I’m blocked from finishing because there are no available ACUs, so I can’t continue executing fixes right now.
What I accomplished:
  • Resized the PCB to a compact 50 × 50 mm, 4-layer board.
  • Re-placed all 34 components for a compact manufacturable layout:
    • ESP32 at board edge with antenna facing outward.
    • USB-C, ESD, charger, battery connector, LDO, IMU, flash, buttons, and LEDs grouped logically.
  • Cleared stale routing and fixed the USB/VBUS routing precheck blockers.
  • Ran full-board auto-routing successfully.
Remaining blockers before the PCB is manufacturing-ready:
  • 35 invalid-layer Smart Via errors from the autorouter.
  • 1 dangling trace warning.
  • 22 generic passives missing manufacturer part numbers.
  • Final DRC/manufacturing validation still needs to be re-run after those fixes.
Suggested next steps once ACUs are available:
  1. Fix/delete or regenerate the invalid Smart Vias.
  2. Delete the dangling trace.
  3. Assign real MPNs to the generic resistors/capacitors.
  4. Re-run DRC/ERC and manufacturing checks.
  5. Export Gerbers, BOM, and pick-and-place only after checks are clean.
Fix routing errors
Complete BOM MPNs
Run final checks
Export manufacturing files

Waiting for input


Schematic of ESP32 Pickleball Tracker

ESP32 Pickleball Tracker

ESP32 Pickleball Tracker thumbnail