AERoS

AERoS

An All-Encompassing Rocket System

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A high-performance, compact rocket flight controller board designed around the STM32F411RET6 microcontroller. This board integrates power management, sensor telemetry, state logging, and servo control into a single-cell Li-Po powered solution optimized for model rocketry and high-altitude aerospace tracking.

CRITICAL DISCLAIMER:

This board is currently in the active development phase. It has been fully routed and designed, but it has NOT been physically manufactured or bench-tested yet.

Board Previews & Renders

(No 3D-models for L1, L2, and L3 were available)

Front 3D Render	Back 3D Render

🛠Hardware & Board Specifications

Core Processing & Power System

• Microcontroller: STM32F411RET6 (ARM Cortex-M4, 100MHz, 512KB Flash, 128KB SRAM).
• Power Source: Designed explicitly for a Single-Cell Lithium-Polymer (Li-Po) battery (~3.7V–4.2V).
• USB Interface: USB-C 2.0 interface supporting both data communication and on-board USB battery charging.
• Power Switch: Featuring a self-latching MOSFET-based power switch to enable digital soft-on/soft-off control or mechanical/pyrotechnic separation deployment triggers.
• Actuator Power: Integrated Step-up (Boost) Converter dedicated to delivering stable, elevated voltages required for servo actuation.

Peripherals & User Interface

• Indicators: 3x Addressable/Configurable RGB LEDs for real-time state indication (e.g., pre-flight, armed, error, data logging active).
• Acoustic Telemetry: On-board Piezo Buzzer for audible flight readiness chirps, continuity checks, and recovery beacons.
• Storage: D3AT SD Card Slot wired via high-speed interface for high-rate blackbox flight logging.
• Debugging: Dedicated ST-Link Connector for SWD programming, flashing, and real-time debugging.

System Architecture

   +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
   |                        USB-C 2.0 / Charger                      |
   +-----------------------------------------------------------------+
        |                           |
        v                           v
   +-------+           +-------------------------+           +-------+
   | Battery| ------>  | Self-Latching MOSFET SW |  -------> | Regs  |
   +-------+           +-------------------------+           +-------+
                                                                 |
            +-----------------------+------------+---------------|
            |                                    |               v
            v                                    v       +---------------+
   +-----------------+                  +------------+   | Servo Boost   |
   | STM32F411RET6   | <--- SPI/I2C --- | Sensor Bus |   +---------------+
   | Microcontroller |                  +------------+           |
   +-----------------+------+                                    v
    |      |        |       | ---------------------------> [ Servo Pins ]
    v      v        v       v
  [LEDs][Buzzer][SD Card][ST-Link]

For schematics, open the project file through KiCad 9.0 (can be found in the board directory)

On-Board Sensors

The sensor suite communicates over optimized I2C/SPI buses to provide highly accurate 9-DOF inertial, environmental, and barometric data.

Design & Development

• EDA Software: Designed completely using KiCad.
• Firmware Compatibility: Perfect pairing with STM32CubeIDE, HAL libraries, or custom bare-metal C/C++ architectures.

Future Scope / Additions (To-Do)

• Physical PCB manufacturing and assembly (PCBA evaluation).
• Continuity testing on the self-latching MOSFET network.
• Bench testing the Step-Up regulator under maximum servo load.
• Developing a comprehensive flight firmware stack (Blackbox logging framework, Kalman filtering for apogee detection).
• Pinout map cheat-sheet (Markdown table matching STM32 pins to hardware blocks).

License & Copyright

This project is licensed under the GNU GPL v3 License.

Copyright (c) 2026 Karthikeya Turimalla (TKAman23)

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

See the accompanying LICENSE file for full terms and conditions.

Attribution Request

If you use parts of this repository, please reference the repository, my username (TKAman23), or me (Karthikeya Turimalla) in your work.

Contributing & Feedback

Since this project is in active prototyping, discussions, issues, and pull requests regarding optimization (especially around power management and thermal layout) are generally welcome! Contact: karthikeyaat@gmail.com.