Hello everyone,
So, recently I started working on a robot project, I own one of those rover 5 robot platform, and wanted to control it with my rPI. The problem is that the controller board utilizes +5V PWM signals, I would need ADC inputs to read the current drawn from the motors, and some +5V enable GPIO for other stuff.
I could use one level shifter to do the job, and many other IC chips for each other feature, but I ended up creating one shield for my rPI that had it all, I named it the "tauShield".
All the features are:
- 16 PWM, 12-bit PWM (frequency from 40 Hz to 1000 Hz)
- 4 16-Bit Analog-to-Digital IO's
- 16 GPIO'S through an expander IC
- 8 native rPI GPIO with +5V logic input / output
- IR emitter / receiver
- nRF24L01 adaptor (ultra low power 2Mbps RF transceiver for the 2.4GHz , excellent to talk to Arduinos, remote control the robot, etc...)
Ordered the PCB from oshpark:
After 1 hour of hand soldering, the result:
The shield also has a power jack that power the Raspberry PI with a overcurrent protection. The IC's share a I2C bus, the address of each IC can be changed soldering the jumper pads.
This is my first real "board" and I already noticed some stuff that can be improved, but it is working like a charm.
I still have extra 2 boards of this revision, and 2 from the first revision (does not have the GPIO expander and utilizes sparkfun's nRF24L01 adaptor), if anybody is interested let me know, I would need to hand solder it and ship to you.
So what do you guys think of my shield? suggestions? improvements? what is missing?
Couple more pictures:
Best regards,
Vitor Henrique
