The RoBoC is a robotics controller board designed for the Robotics club of Stellenbosch. It features a dsPIC33 microcontroller, a motor river and plenty of IO pins. This was designed to be cheaper than off the shelf development boards with the necessary extras.
Please see the full documentation at http://kolijnwolfaardt.github.io/RoBoC/
The PCB is designed in Kicad. All the project files can be found in ./PCB Design, and the extra component footprints created are in ./PCB Design/lib. Some of these components are adapted from the libraries supplied with KiCad.
The board was originally designed as a 4 layer board, with power and some signals on the inner copper layers. This proved to be too expensive, so the board was redesigned as a 2-layer board.
The ds30 Bootloader code supplied here is a modified version of the ds30 Loader. The following changes were made:
- The initialization includes configuring the oscillator and PLL
- The UART initialization was simplified.
- An LED on the board is turne on and off to indicate when the bootloader is waiting for commands.
- The memory footprint of the bootloader was reduces by commenting out some of the original (unused) code.
To compile the bootloader the MPLAB IDE v8.92 and the ASM30 compiler were used, on a pc running Windows. The resulting hex file can be written to the board using a PicKit2 or PicKit3.
To use the bootloader, use the program supplied on the ds30 Loader website.
- The Microcontroller is a dsPic33FJ32GS606
- USB to UART IC is a MCP2200
- The Motor driver is a ON Semiconductor LV8405V
- The PCB is a 2-layer 5cm by 10cm board
- The Hardware is licensed under the CERN OSH License
- The ds30 Bootloader is licensed under the GNU GPLv2 Licens
- Software written for the board is licensed under the CC Attribution-NonCommerical License