Experimental Robot Platform

Step 2 The Electronics

There was no good microcontroller on the market that can handle all the features I needed.

So using Eagle CAD software I custom designed my own microcontroller, which I call the Axon. It is 100% RoHS compliant, as is the rest of the robot (meaning, lead free and environmentally safe).

It has tons of features, like 16 ADC, 4 UARTs, USB, a bootloader, 55+ I/O, 16MHz, 64kb of flash, and 8kb of RAM.

To mount it, I first screwed on some spacers (see first image). Then I put it on the ERP and attached all the sensor and servo wires (second image).

Comments

[jwlangston]

Very nice, compact PCB. I have a question for you. Currently I use DipTrace for my stuff and not familiar with Eagle3D. Does Eagle3D really let you custom design microcontrollers? Is this done at the VLSI level? Drag and drop?

[societyofrobots]

Eagle is pretty much the industry standard for electronics design. Eagle3D is an add-on to Eagle for 3D visualization. Google up some Eagle tutorials for more info . . .

[jeff-o]

Eagle isn't the industry standard, but it is just about the best electronics design package you can get on a hobbyist budget. Their freeware version lets you design boards up to 4x6 inches with two layers. The student/non-profit version is $130 and can do much larger boards of up to 4 layers. www.cadsoft.de

[jwlangston]

What I meant is did you use Eagle to design the microcontroller IC itself, or add external ICs/functionality to it? I'd love to design a controller from the ground up (including the architecture/ISA). Currently I'm looking at using an FPGA such as the Spartan to do so, using something like a SoPC builder. If this Eagle allows similar functionality, I'll have to check it out. Also, very nice website. I wish I had the time to do more stuff like that.

[societyofrobots]

Oh no I used the ATmega2560 for this robot. Unless you're insanely rich and don't mind dropping several million on a fab, designing actual mcu IC's is beyond your reach =P

I am not familiar with any commercially available IC design software . . .

[Darth Vader]

yes! C is very important...