Collins Aerospace has requested that the team create a compact and robust data logger that can withstand extreme environmental temperatures for long periods for use in testing aircraft parts in simulated real-life settings. The data offer will sample signals of +/- 15V at a frequency of 1MHz and store them on a removable storage device. The data logger enclosure will be constructed to ensure that it can withstand outside temperatures of -40°C to 85°C in an environmental chamber and act as a Faraday cage to provide electromagnetic shielding for the electronics. The electrical and computer engineering team has designed a six-layer printed circuit board for the data logger. The requirements for the circuit board are that it should be compact, be able to sample four differential inputs at 1MHz frequency, be able to withstand temperatures of -40°C to 85°C, store the digitized version of the signals on a removable storage device, read user input settings, and have status indicators. Our PCB design includes four Twin BNC connectors for the four differential inputs, two-stage instrumentation amplifiers with programmable gain to step down the input signal to an acceptable range for the high sample rate analog to digital converters, a Xilinx FPGA/CPU, USB-C input to power the onboard voltage regulators, three LED status indicators, and a microSD card slot to store the signals and read user settings.

Our team collaborated with Mechanical Engineering 15,Systems Engineering 2 on this project.