Final Board

Front view of PCB

The front side of the PCB is the bulk of the components for the battery management system. Components were placed on the back of the PCB during the routing phase in order to reduce the overall size of our PCB as much as possible. Had to be very careful soldering the small components on the front layer of the PCB, where the components near the Texas Instrument microcontroller were the smallest and took the utmost care.

Back side of PCB

The two pictures shown above illustrate a fully hand soldered front and back side of our final custom BMS PCB design.

Due to the lack of funding from SFSU IRA, we had to contact several companies to look for sponsorships, Bay Area Circuits was among the few companies who was willing to print us free circuit boards for our project. Bay Area Circuits printed us a total of 6 PCBs for our project. We could have designed a larger sized board to fit all the components on one side, but we decided to fit components on both the front and backside so we can be more space efficient when we implement the PCB to the FSAE electric vehicle. Being our first time soldering small surface mount components, it was a great learning experience . Over the many hours of soldering roughly two hundred components onto our PCB, we had to use special soldering equipment such as a heat gun and heat temperature station to be able to solder the isolation circuit component and the Texas Instruments bq76pl455a integrated circuit. In conclusion, the soldering of these components came out better than expected because it was our first time soldering small surface mount components on a fabricated four layer PCB.