It occurred to me that it would be useful to have a simple way to manually remotely control a robot (instead of having to rely on autonomous logic alone or having to implement custom wifi/bt protocols for remote control), so I added a USB-A connector to the board and bumped the hardware version to 1.3. This makes it possible to use a standard gamepad—either with a bluetooth dongle or an RC simulator dongle (e.g., FrSky XSR-SIM)—to control the target project.

The controller then appears as an HID device on the compute module, and button presses/joystick positions can be easily read in the OS. I tested this from Go today (https://github.com/0xcafed00d/joystick).

Now that I’ve verified all the basic hardware functionality, it’s time to start planning an open-source release of the project. Depending on how many sunny days we get this summer (I live in Norway…), I’m aiming to release it as open source in late summer/early autumn.

Have a great summer, everyone! :)