CACKLE - Card Adaptable Controller Kinetic Link Electronics

CACKLE - Card Adaptable Controller Kinetic Link Electronics

This is designed to be a super small, open source, adaptable control board. Each module is arranged in units of 1.5cm squared, but can handle high power (2amp!) micro robotic actuators, such as my Mighty-Micro-Motors. Ideally, this board can be reused and rebuilt for all sorts of small robots.

You can read up on specific modules in their respective folders in Hardware, or take a look at the overall architecture on my GitHub repo: https://github.com/techy-robot/CACKLE

Architecture

There are currently 6 types of sub-boards:

• Hubs (with an MCU on it, supports 2 or 4 drivers, 2 expansion cards, and a chain of peers)
• PSUs (typically only one board)
• Expansion Cards (vertical mezzanine connector boards for breaking out sensors and other interfaces)
• Drivers (Any high power driver)
• nanoSPI devices (Small 7-pin flex cable SPI devices, mostly for sensors)
• Passives (spacers, end caps, etc...)

The base unit for this project is 1.5 cm squared. The expansion cards and drivers should each be 1 unit, the Hubs 1x1 or 1x2, and the PSUs 3x1 units. For example, with a 12 motor board you would need 1 PSU, 3 1-by-2 hubs, and 12 drivers; the board would be 45x105mm. nanoSPI devices can be much smaller due to the 2.4mm wide flex cable, such as a 5mm diameter magnetic encoder.

Real Life pictures:

Design pictures:

Goals

• Adaptable
• Small
• Extendable by other developers
• Easy to use
• Powerful

Features

Required

• Small modules
• Hubs with a mcu that can talk to its peers and a master
• Motor driver boards that can handle several amps
• Sensor ports with protocols like i2c and SPI
• Extendable architecture
• PSUs
• LED status lights

Nice to Have

• Distributed computing with a multi-master network
• Easy automatic hardware configuration
• Ability to stack hubs vertically using the Expansion Card system, in addition to horizontal chaining.

Hackster.io PCB design competition note

This project is designed for the hackster.io pcb design competition, specifically targeting the Frankenboard award with my modular design and the variety of components involved. The multi-board design is costly however, with of the ESP32-S3 board alone from PCBway costing around $193.40. This is a 6-layer design with ENIG coating, nothing else special.

Current Designs

ESP32-S3 4 driver hub:

DRV8213 4 amp brushed motor driver:

2 cell 40 amp usb c battery charger and power supply:

Basic 2 connector Expansion Card:

MA735 nanoSPI magnetic encoder

Software

As of now software is very limited in scope, I have not had the time to fully assembly and test the boards I have made. I am planning on using SimpleFOC and Luos Engine. SimpleFOC is a motor driver library for Field Oreinted Control for motors. Luos Engine is a lightweight-distributed communication engine that aims to make hardware as modular as software. Combined, I have covered 50% of the use-cases of the code necessary for this project.

Most of the code found in the repo is luos node definitions and driver services for the hardware modules, designed to be easily reusable in your project. There are also some tests and example code.