System-Level UAV Electrical Design - How Do You Validate Power Architecture?

[Yury]

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on several UAV projects and kept running into the same issue — system-level electrical architecture is still mostly manual.

Before PCB layout, we usually sketch power distribution, ESC connections, BECs, battery paths, current loads, etc. But validating everything (wire gauge, current limits, missing connections) often becomes a manual double-check process.

 

PCB tools handle board design well, but system-level UAV power architecture still feels under-supported.

 

I’m curious:

How do you validate your UAV electrical architecture?

Do you calculate wire sizing manually?

Do you use any structured workflow before PCB stage?

 

We ended up building a small internal tool that helps generate and validate UAV electrical diagrams (including automatic wire calculation). It turned out surprisingly useful, especially for catching missing connections early.

 

I’m mainly interested in understanding how others handle this stage of development.