Sintecs x Project MARCH
Project MARCH is a multidisciplinary team of 27 students, with a mission to improve the quality of life for people with paraplegia. To realize this each year, we design, develop and manufacture an exoskeleton. An exoskeleton is a robotic motorized suit that enables someone with a complete spinal cord injury, who is wheelchair-bound, to stand up and walk again. We designed this year’s exoskeleton together with our 28th and most important team member: our pilot, Koen van Zeeland. Koen has a complete spinal cord injury and has been working with Project MARCH for 3 years now.
The movement of the exoskeleton relies on power and power distribution. For this, we use the power distribution board (PDB). The main function of the PDB is distributing power to all motor controllers, as well as supplying power to the computer and Wi-Fi module. It keeps track of the current consumption by the motor controllers and can even stop the supply with automatic sensors or a manual emergency button if the demand gets too high. Because of these functions, the PDB is a key component in the exoskeleton.
Our goal this year is to develop a self-balancing exoskeleton in previous years, our pilot relied on crutches to maintain stability while using the exoskeleton. However, our goal for this year is to eliminate the need for crutches, allowing the user to have their hands free. Achieving this objective necessitates improvements in the electrical system.
Reliability of the PDB is one of the key challenges as we strive to maximize training time with the exoskeleton. In the past, training time was often limited due to frequent breakdowns of various components. The process of replacing, repairing, and debugging can take a long time, prompting us to prioritize enhanced reliability in our printed circuit boards (PCBs).
With the help of Sintecs, we were able to finetune the looks and organization of the schematics well in advance of the PCB design phase. Their guidance on utilizing Altium greatly improved our understanding of the program. Moreover, Sintecs truly excelled during the PCB design process, investing significant hours in guiding us to create a PDB design for longer use and adopting improved layout ideologies.. We successfully minimized errors and significantly decreased the probability of PCB failures. With the final human and computer-based checks, such as the DFM/DFA check, all critical errors were eliminated before entering the production phase, streamlining the testing process. Thanks to Sintecs, we now have greater confidence in the PCB design process.
The PDB of the MARCH VIII exoskeleton.