Parts of a Drone System

Parts of a Drone System

Parts of a Drone System

By : Jakkir Hussain,

Drone System Hardware

From an engineer’s view, the key parts of a drone system are the hardware, software, and mechanical elements; and a perfect balance between the three provides a flawless system design.

Hardware

Hardware is the electrical part of the drone system, which is eventually a PCBA (printed circuit board assembly). Hardware is a multilayer PCB that accommodates the SOC (system on a chip) and different components of the subsystems interconnected through copper traces (part of the PCB) or physical wires. Figure 1-2 shows the PCBA assembled with SOC and subsystems on the top side (primary side).

Parts of a Drone System-1

Figure 1-2. PCBA mounted with SOC and subsystems

The SOC

The SOC is a miniature computer on a chip of a present generation systems, especially a drone system. It’s a semiconductor device and an integrated circuit that usually integrates digital, analog, mixed signal, and radio frequency devices on a single chip. SOCs are most commonly used in mobile computing and embedded systems.

In general, there are three distinguishable types of SOCs: SOCs built around a microcontroller, SOCs built around a microprocessor, and specialized SOCs designed for specific applications that do not fit into the above two categories.

SOC usually consume less power and have a lower cost than the multichip systems they replace.

Note: 

Intel Core, Atom, and Quark processors are SOCs on a single package.

Figure 1-3 shows a typical SOC that integrate digital, analog, and mixed signal devices on a single chip. The device at the center of the SOC is the silicon, and some capacitors are distributed on the top side of the SOC. The bottom side of the SOC shows pins (called as balls in a ball grid array), which are soldered on to a PCB to establish the connection with the subsystems through PCB traces. You’ll see more details on this in later sections.

Parts of a Drone System - 2
Figure 1-3. Top and bottom views of the SOC



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