All the projects below were developed by me, some with the help of my team. We designed most of the parts for every project, including electronics, mechanics, and software.
Higher quality photos of all the project below and some additional projects can be found here.
Demo.
3D model of the robot (opens in browser).
This is one of my most advanced control systems projects. This robot can balance on any pair of wheels at any moment. Also, the robot can move like a 4 wheeled car. The working mode is chosen dynamically using a hybrid state machine. The main twist of the robot is the ability to climb up a wall to change the mode from 4 wheeled into balancing. This feature works partly because the robot motors don't have enough torque, so the robot needs a small push at the beginning of the climbing process.
I personally designed all parts of the project: electronics (in Fusion 360 electronics), mechanics (in Fusion 360) and control firmware (using CMSIS on STm32).
3D model of the board (opens in browser).
The main idea of the board is to be able to control different types of small and medium two-motor systems (up to 100W per motor).
This is a 4 layers board, that contains STM32G4 MCU, 2 DC motor controllers from Texas Instruments, a NRF24L01+ radio module, 6 axis IMU, buck converter, and two interfaces: UART and CAN. The bidirectional balancing robot uses 2 such boards: one for each wheel pair.
3D model of the remote controller (opens in browser).
This is a 2 layers board with the main idea that there should not be any visible traces on the top side so that it can be used as a top part of the case. The main complexity of the board was in placing all the traces on 1.5 sides (with a small amount of space under components on the top side). This board is used to remotely control our robots including the bidirectional balancing robot.
The board contains STM32G0 MCU, NRF24L01+ radio module, LDO-based power supply and LI-ION battery protection and charging unit.
3D model of the stand (opens in browser).
These stands were designed to teach students STM32 programming on somewhat modern hardware. The case is made of sheet metal. The stand has a modular structure that allows for different extension modules to be installed at different moments in time.
I designed 3D-model, firmware and teaching instructions (for CMSIS on STM32) for the project and mentored electronics design for it. We ordered and assembled 30 pcs.
3D model of the first version of the new control board (opens in browser);
3D model of the first version of the new control board connected to a motor (opens in browser).
3D model of the second version of the new control board (opens in browser).
3D model of the encoder board (opens in browser).
Both version 1 and 2 (both are on the pictures above) are 4-layers boards that contain STM32G4 MCU, the Trinamic TMC5130 stepper driver, buck converter and encoder interface. The first version of the driver was intended to be mounted on the back of the NEMA17 stepper motor, but that required a tight packing of all the components and complex assembly. The second version was separated into 2 boards - simple magnetic encoder board and one-sided controller board which made design more robust, cheaper and more manufacturable.
At the beginning, this project included electronics upgrade and firmware development for the new electronics. New boards were build and tested and passed all the tests, but because of the clinical trials' deadlines it was decided to switch to firmware upgrade of the old version of the hardware (that wasn't designed by us). I had successfully rewritten 95% of the initial firmware from SPL to CMSIS, added new requested features and devices passed trials with no recorded bugs and malfunctions.
After the trials, I supported the project with minor features updates for more than a year. One of the biggest upgrades was the integration of the Particle Boron board into the system to implement the basic IOT functionality.
Demo.
Simple website + web server project for the ESP32 to control differential drive robots using websocket with custom joysticks.