Inside our pressure case is an array of subsystems and sensors which need to communicate with a central computing device. To establish this communication, we designed a PCB which mates with a commercial microcontroller board, the Digilent Chipkit Max32. Our PCB has over 30 connectors which mate with our accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, computer, leak detector, power supply, depth sensor, motor controllers, and solenoids.

The microcontroller PCB allows the “master” computer to be dedicated to image processing tasks and delegate smaller tasks to the “slave” microcontroller. Images of the PCB’s 3D rendering, and final assembly are shown below: