UoB SAT SOM Camera Adapter

A KiCAD hardware design for a PCB adapter board developed for the University of Bristol Satellite (UoB SAT) project.

Compute platform — none on this board

This is a passive adapter: there is no microcontroller or processor on the board itself. All compute lives in the Variscite DART-MX8M-PLUS SoM on the carrier board that this adapter plugs into. The DART-MX8M-PLUS runs the camera drivers and image acquisition pipeline; this board’s only job is to get the signals from one connector format to another without degrading them.

The one active component is a TXS0104EPWR bidirectional level translator, which is needed because the DART-MX8M-PLUS carrier uses 3.3 V I2C logic levels while the Xenics camera uses 1.8 V — connecting them directly would risk permanently damaging the camera’s I2C pins. The MIPI differential lanes themselves pass through passively with no active components in the signal path, which keeps the insertion loss low and avoids adding signal conditioning complexity between the SoM and the camera.

Description

This board is an edge card adapter that bridges the MIPI-CSI camera interfaces on a Variscite DART-MX8M System-on-Module (SOM) carrier board to FPC (Flexible Printed Circuit) cables, enabling connection to Xenics LWIR MicroCube 640 thermal infrared cameras.

The DART-MX8M carrier board exposes its MIPI-CSI camera interfaces through a high-density edge card connector (HSEC8), while the thermal cameras use a different FPC connector format (Hirose DF40HC). This adapter board provides:

• Physical interface translation between the HSEC8 edge card and DF40HC FPC connectors
• Voltage level shifting via a TXS0104EPWR bidirectional level translator, converting I2C control signals between the 3.3 V and 1.8 V domains used by the carrier board and camera respectively

Designed in KiCAD 8.0.