Product Description: This kit contains the PCB and all the parts needed to build the Robot Builder’s R-duino V2 controller.
First 10 boards available for sale now!
Price: $30.00
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The Robot Builder’s R-duino controller allows a robot builder to easily build a small robot that uses 2 small geared DC motors for driving, directly plug in 6 analog sensors, 6 digital sensors or 6 servos. It has an on board 5V 3A LDO voltage regulator, a 3.3V 250mA regulator, a power switch to turn on the regulated power to the electronics, a second power switch to turn on the power to the motors/servos, reset button, power LED, pin D13 LED, 16 MHz crystal, ISP programmer connector and FTDI cable connector. The ATmega328P microcontroller has the Arduino bootloader and the Blink sketch uploaded. The board features 3 jumpers, one to select power for the servo pins, and two for selecting the motor control method, either 2 pins or 3 pins for each motor. You can plug in almost any shield or you can use the standard 0.1″ spacing male headers to build your own home made shield from perf board.
Here is a picture of the assembled board:
Download the Assembly Guide here.
Does the FTDI cable go to the six pins on the far left-up corner? And the the other end goes to the 9 pins on the back of my PC?
Yes, the FTDI cable goes to
the 6 pins in the upper left cornerthe 6 pin connector at the bottom of the board in this picture. (Version 1 had the FTDI connector in the upper left corner. Sorry about the confusion.) The FTDI cable is a USB-serial cable, so the other end goes to the USB port on your computer, not to the 9 pin RS232 port. FTDI is a chip that converts your USB port into a TTL serial port, but they are kind of expensive. I sell USB-serial cables that use a Prolific chip to do the same thing and they cost about half of a FDTI cable.Hi Titus,
Um, in the photo above, would the “FTDI” pins on the bottom of the image??
Thanks!
Regards, Terry King
…On the Mediterranean in Italy
terry@yourduino.com
Hi Terry,
Yes, the FTDI connector is at the bottom of this image. In the previous version the connector was on the top left corner of the board, it seems that in the previous post I gave wrong instructions… Sorry about that… I’ll edit the post to clarify this issue.
Thanks for your input!
Hello,
This is a great Arduino clone. I bought some Arduino boards in the last few years and I saw that the main missing component was DC motor driver on board. You have it! I tried another great board; DFRduino but when you use DC motors and some sensors you don’t have any IO left for LCD. Adding shields is not the best choice in many cases.
Can you/ Will you make another one with 3A DC motor driver and some more IO’s like Arduino Mega? It’d would be a great addition to the community and I bet you’ll have many customers.
In the meantime; how can I upgrade R-duino V2 to drive 3A DC motors?
Regards,
Mert
Hi Mert,
Thanks for your kind words. I hoped that my work would make at least a few robot builders happy. As you can see, I have started with controllers for small robots, that use motors up to 1A each. A quick “upgrade” can be done by stacking 3 SN754410 chips one on top of the other, piggyback style. To help out with the heat distribution, I suggest to add an aluminum heat sink made with a long tail that can be folded in between the chips like an S. Make sure the heat sink does not touch any pins and use a bit of heat sink silicon compound, like the one used for mounting computer processor heat sink fans. This is a bit of a hack, I have seen it done successfully, but I never needed so much current, so I never done it myself.
Regarding a new controller that is more powerful, I am not sure at this moment. I would need to use SMD parts and that requires assembly by the fabhouse, which is expensive for small runs. I will perhaps work on a design and perhaps see if I can either have Seeed Studio sell it or something like that. We’ll see. Thanks for the suggestion!
Gabriel.
Hello again Gabriel,
Stacking 3 chips doesn’t seem right. I’ve found another good board with 7A motor drivers and a good voltage distribution circuit to drive motors, logic, different voltage sensors etc. But the problem is the same; small MCU, not enough I/O or processing power.
For product distribution Adafruit, Seeed, RobotShop are all good choices for you I guess. As a businessman myself, I’m pretty sure your Big-R-Duino will sell a good deal
Regards,
Mert