CVRA's Robotics CAN Ecosystem

April 2018.

This year, we built twin robots: Order and Chaos, using our modular ecosystem of CAN boards.
Each robot contained 18 boards (1 beacon, 1 adapter, 1 sensor, 3 IO, 12 motor).

We won the second place at the Swiss national competition (SwissEurobot).
Read our full blog post for more details.

March 2018.

First use case of our new sensor board: we put one at the end of each arm.
The arm of the robot is used this year to build towers. These are made of 60mm cubes of different colors. We use this board to verify if cubes are picked up properly, and if the tower is build according to the plan.

March 2018.

A new member to the family: sensor boards.
These are going to be useful for short distance measurement and RGB color detection.

We made a small batch of 5 boards to start, and got to use our new modified toaster oven with a pre-programmed reflow profile.

April 2016.

This year's new addition is an IO board. It's cheap, small, and connected, what else?

Don't they look great fresh out of the oven?

June 2015.

Wiring of the robots went well, although we had a lot of motors to wire.
If you didn't trust us when we told you the board fits on the back of an RC servo, here is a picture of the main robot's arm featuring three grippers each driven by a hobby RC servo modified using our motor boards.

Our new modular robot concept won the jury award at the Swiss national competition.

April 2015.

The firmware is all done, or at least good enough for now.
Four of our members spent 20 hours over a weekend to assemble the remaining 55 boards.

We split tasks with one person testing boards, and the three others applying the solder paste on the boards using a stencil and placing the components on the board.
We turned this space into a Shenzhen factory.

We made a board holder out of plaster so we could easily solder boards in batches of five in our toaster oven.

And here they are, fresh out of the oven, 55 motor boards soldered and tested.

Don't stare too much or you might get hypnotized!

All 60 boards are done. Time to build robots!

January 2015.

The board design is done!
It passed review, and we ordered 100 PCBs and components for assembling 60 boards. We only need about 40 boards for our two robots, but we need spares too, better safe than sorry.

The final version is 30.8mm by 16.0mm and fits on the back of a big hobby RC servo.

Schematics, gerber files, and KiCad files are all available on Github.