Designing an M-7 flight in a 34x32mm form factor

Hello PCBWay community! 👋

We are a small group of engineers and students who love building flight systems. Our goal is to create one of the smallest yet most powerful flight controllers ever designed—all packed into a 34x32 mm 4-layer PCB.

We are building a custom flight controller based on the STM32H723 microcontroller. This board combines high-speed processing, sensor fusion, and real-time control in a very compact form. It is designed for drones, robotics, and research applications where size and performance both matter. Most flight controllers on the market are either large or limited in performance. We wanted to challenge ourselves to design a tiny, efficient, and industrial-grade controller that could handle advanced navigation and control algorithms—especially Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) fusion for sensors.

Our flight controller integrates a 15-state EKF that fuses data from multiple sensors:

1. ICM20948 and ICM42670 for precise IMU data
2. IS8310 for magnetometer readings
3. BMP388 for barometric altitude
4. GNSS module for position tracking

The controller communicates through 4 USART ports, FDCAN, and USB-B and has multiple GPIOs and SWD for debugging.

It also supports 8 PWM outputs and SBUS for receiver input. All of this fits in a tiny 34x32 mm board—made possible by the precision and reliability of PCBWay’s 4-layer PCB manufacturing.