Rosmo robot

Made some progress, Microblocks, Mecanum are working now.

Also got

Theres a little video here

I added a header for the Lidar sensor I'm not sure if the new £45 one will work with ROS2 yet, but the pinout seems to be the same as the older £69 ones so I stuck one on for covenience

I finished* routing the 'main' breakout board

I also did one with a Wemos(ish) footprint

Both of these are designed to connect to the Mikrobus header on https://rosmo-robot.github.io/

* It's not actually finished, I just haven't spotted the errors yet

• Ground islands (hopefully!) removed
• Added a bunch of capacitors to smooth out the power
• Added a 5v header (bottom of the PCB) So you could plug in one of these USB-C connectors the idea is you could then add a USB powered Wifi/ AI camera
• Added extra female header so you could now use the Open hardware ESP32-S3 or the closed hardware ones that are a bit cheaper
• Bottom silkscreen tidied up a bit
• More: rosmo-robot.github.io/

Did a bit of work on a version with on-board L9110S motor drivers, you can find that here it's currently untested, but I'll try it soon

I've just ordered a PCB that I'm hopeful will be a 'Version 1' https://rosmo-robot.github.io that I'll offer for sale on Lectronz.

This will support Microblocks Teleop from an Android app and also ROS2 Teleop from a browser.

There's a bunch of further software stuff that I'd like to get done 'at some point' I thought it would be good to write down some of these ideas to help potential collaborators jump into a bit of the project that's interesting to them.

ROS2 tasks

• Create a URDF file for simulation
• Confirm the Lidar to be working
• Confirm IMU working
• Confirm Mecanum drive working
• Configure Foxlglove studio
• Create up to date Virtualbox image of ROS2 install
• Use BeagleboardY-AY for on-board compute/ vision processing
• Create Docker image of ROS2 install

Microblocks tasks

• Confirm Ultrasonic working
• Confirm vl53l0x working
• Write autonomy sketch based on distance sensors
• Confirm OLED 'eyes' working
• Write 'eyes' sketch to give some personality
• Configure Android app to support voice control
• Configure Android app to have 'eyes' so phone can be robot-mounted

Hardware tasks

• Iterate on 'Rosmo' the 'daughterboard' & 'Medium' PCB

Organisation/documentation tasks

• Add photos to 'build' page & tweak wording
• Add PCB to Lectronz store
• Social media stuff, make some videos

Arduino tasks

• Do Arduino sketch based on Smartcar shield work

Micropython tasks

• Do alternate Micropython firmware

If you'd like to get involved in any of that you could join the project team here, or chat to me on Twitter

At one end of https://rosmo-robot.github.io/ you'll spot a MikroBUS expansion header, the thinking with this is that this gives access to the ~1200 official MikroBus click boards

There is also scope for people to make expansion boards based on the very useful pinout.

I started having a play with one today, tackling the all important question of how to give this robot silly eyes.

In the image below you'll see a bunch of interfaces;

• Pimoroni breakout garden I2C and SPI headers
• UEXT female header for the open hardware Olimex sensors
• Two I2C for the all important silly eyes OLED (haven't yet decided between the 1.3" or 1.5" pinout)

The MikroBus header compliments the on-board Qwiic and I2C breakout garden header as an attempt to navigate the I2C Zoo maybe I should stick a Grove on the breakout board to complete the menagerie..

This variant adds a Grove & Xiao camera for on board image processing 

Read more

Did some more edits on the PCB, including adding an additional I2C breakout header, I chose the Breakout garden pin order for this header.

• Female header would enable users to plug in either some straight or 90degree pins
• Alternately plug in a breakout garden socket
• Enables plugging in the I2C range of Breakout Garden components
• Also enables use of 4trionics ultrasonic sensor
• Alternately you could stick some Dupont cables into it if that's more your jam

Having a bunch of encoder cabling is quite messy, It is functional but also fiddly to connect. I've almost finished a version that includes pluggable motor sockets to make the cable connection easier and less error prone