Copper Robotics Targets Raspberry Pi-Powered Rust-Language Balance Bots with the BalanceHAT

Copper Robotics, a company aiming to deliver a robust open source robotics framework written in Rust, has announced a Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) accessory for the Raspberry Pi Zero family: the BalanceHAT controller..

"Some background: while working on various pieces of hardware to test Copper on them, I picked on purpose a very under-powered platform like the [Raspberry Pi] Zero to push the limits of what the software engine can do," Copper Robotics founder Guillaume Binet explains. "Doing this I ended up with contraptions like this horrible rat nest… And decided to clean that up and build a proper self contained [Raspberry Pi] HAT for it."

The BalanceHAT, which is designed to match the footprint of a Raspberry Pi Zero, Zero W, or Zero 2 W and connects over the 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, is a single-motor controller for compact robots, focusing on self-balancing projects. It includes a single DC motor output, controlled by pulse-width modulation (PWM) signals from the host Raspberry Pi, an input for a directional Hall-effect encoder, and an analog input for a secondary sensor.

A USB Type-C port with USB Power Delivery (PD) compatibility powers both the HAT and the Raspberry Pi to which it's attached, negotiation for up to 60W of power — which, in turn, can be used to drive any 12V DC motor. The analog input, meanwhile, offers 12-bit precision and three megasamples per second (MS/s) sampling rate, communicating with the host over a 48MHz SPI bus.

"This is all you need to build nifty little robots," Binet claims of his creation, "like a self balancing rod, a self balancing one wheeler (we understand why it is called balanceHAT by now), [and] various Roomba like vehicles."

More information on the BalanceHAT is available on the Copper website; the Copper framework itself is available on GitHub under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.