Purchasing Mainboard - lead times?

[shaantamchawla]

Hello PyCubed community! Does anyone know current lead times for the PyCubed Mainboard? At the time of this posting (Sept 2022), I've looked at the Unpacking & Hardware Overview section of the PyCubed docs but don't see a place where I can actually order this box.

We're fans of the PyCubed platform and intent on using an open-source platform. If lead times / chip supply is the issue, we'd appreciate any alternative recommendations for our CubeSat project 🙏

[Mikefly123]

Hi @shaantamchawla, unfortunately due to some pretty severe shortages in the chips used on the PyCubed I don't think there is any real existing stock of PyCubeds that are not already committed to flight projects. There is a small community effort at the moment to swap out some of the terminally out of stock ICs and get a small production run going in early 2023!

[mlyle]

@Mikefly123 Hey, I had one question. We're looking at this and the 2x 18650's on the bottom probably don't quite cut it for us. Does this have provisions for a separate battery board (e.g. connectors to the battery bus, )?

[mlyle]

Is this getting closer? I've got a team anxious to try out your work!

[Mikefly123]

Hi @mlyle thank you for picking this thread back up, I forget to check the GitHub forums pretty often. I am much more responsive on Discord if you would like to add me there: Ninja Vanish#0597. @nidlu feel free to also add me on Discord!

Since I made that post a few weeks ago we actually have made one major design revision of the whole architecture to meet a short turn around flight opportunity that is coming up in April, so if all goes well we will actually have an opportunity it get flight heritage on this design just around the corner!

Here's a short summary of what has changed from V1 to V2 in order to meet the upcoming flight opportunity we have:

• Broke into two boards an EPS and a combined Flight Computer and Antenna board to accommodate more power and integrate the antennas without needing a third PCB.
• Added enough connectors to fully wire up a 1U CubeSat with solar panels.
• Descoped the 40-pin connector for now. As @mlyle said this was going to be a spot for a Raspberry Pi Zero to be attached to the board. We didn't have much luck with supplying enough power for this on the prototype, but we want to come back to it. I also think it could be an easy way to attach peripherals that are already designed as Raspberry Pi Hats or other things.

Here are pictures of the board layouts as ordered from JLC last night!

We have 10x of each board coming in, and we actually have an entire prototype build that we completed this last weekend as well that is running tests in our lab right now! Had some design mistakes that needed to be corrected, so that is the version we ordered last night. Hopefully we can get it in hand in a week and a half or so and actually end out a few boards for others to test within the month!

Here's a little family photo of the 1U CubeSats that we are hoping to send to LEO to test out this new architecture and get some flight heritage this year:

[DylanL7]

Hello @Mikefly123, my team is also very interested in this new design and would love to test it out! is there any way we could assemble the prototype boards ourselves to test with?

[Mikefly123]

Hey @DylanL7 contact me on my Discord listed above and I'd love to chat about getting you a set of boards!