Overview

Take this bare board, add an mbed or LPCXpresso, sensors, and an RC truck, and you're well on your way to creating your own autonomous rover!

This is the baseboard in my self-driving 1986 Jeep Grand Wagoneer. The robot Jeep won Sparkfun AVC 2014 with three perfect runs and was the first full size car ever entered. Video

This is also the baseboard I used on Data Bus, my self-driving RC car that took 3rd place in 2012 running a maximum speed of 20mph, posting the 2nd-fastest raw time.

Features

• Supports LPCXpresso or mbed,
• 3 UARTs (mbed) or 4 (LPCXpresso): GPS, CMUcam, LCD module, etc.,
• Each UART port has 5V and 3.3V supply pins,
• Current limiting resistors on all UARTs for 5V devices,
• Servo outputs for ESC and Servo,
• Receiver inputs for ESC and Servo (or aux outputs),
• Optional onboard 3.3V, 1A regulator for LPCXpresso,
• I2C bus with 5 ports (each with 5V and 3.3V rails),
• 2 (mbed) or 4 (LPCXpresso) wheel encoder inputs (or quad encoders),
• 2 (mbed) or 5 (LPCXpresso) aux digital pin ports
• 2 hardware PWM / digital pin ports
• 4 analog ports for voltage/current monitoring or GPIO,
• An onboard MicroSD socket for data logging,
• Remote reset port, and
• Remote boot/program port (LPCXpresso).

Kit Includes

• Includes circuit board,
• All resistors, capacitors, microSD socket,
• Female pin header socket for MCU, and
• pin headers.

Hardware Details

The board is an evolution of my mbed autonomous rover baseboard, originally developed in late 2010 to compete in the Sparkfun AVC. I've tweaked and tuned and improved it repeatedly since then. This board is more flexible than APM2.5 or PX4 allowing you to make your own software, MCU and sensor choices.

To Build Your Rover, Add:

• 120MHz LPC1769 LPCXpresso or 96MHz mbed LPC1768
• RoverMux to 'take over' your rover from the MCU
• Dual wheel encoders using QRE1113 sensors on two wheels
• RC car. I use a 1:10 scale ECX Circuit but many others will work
• 5V power supply for Baseboard, GPS/UARTS or else
• Pololu MinIMU-9 or other IMU with vibration-tolerant gyro
• uBlox6 (preferred) or Venus 638FLPX GPS
• Join the diyrovers Google Group to get help developing your solution

Software

I have written software to run Data Bus and the Full Size Jeep robots which is open source and aims to provide experimenters a starting point so they can begin working on algorithms without having to write everything from scratch. Software repository. I'm also working on a Ground Control Station.

Contact us if you have ideas or suggestions.