Make complex robots with ease ------RoverWing

Do you want to build complicated robotics projects with ease? RoverWing is what you need, which is designed by David Bershadsky and Alexander Kirillov from Team Islandbots.

RoverWing is an expansion board for Adafruit’s Feather boards. This wing provides motor drivers that can handle motors of 6-12 V, Inertial Motion Unit (IMU), and connection ports for servos, sonars, GPS, and other peripherals commonly used by mobile robots.

It also contains a microcontroller preloaded with firmware to control these peripherals, which communicates with the Feather board using the I2C protocol, thus freeing resources of the Feather board for other purposes. Other than lots of peripherals, it also takes up very little Feather pin space, and includes a simple, well-documented, wide-ranging Arduino library.

Features & Specifications

Power: Can be powered by 7-14 V power source

• Contains a voltage regulator providing power to the Feather board

On-board microcontroller: Microchip SAMD21G

• The same MCU that is used in Arduino Zero
• Takes care of low-level operations such as counting motor encoder pulses, using preloaded firmware

On-board IMU: 6-DoF Inertial Motion Unit (IMU)

• Based on ICM42605 chip, which can be used for tracking robot orientation in space

Motors:

• Connections for two brushed DC motors, at up to 2.9 A at 14 V per motor
• Quadrature encoders for each motor

Sonars: Support for three HC-SR04 or compatible ultrasonic sensors (sonars)

Servos: Connections for four servos (5 V)

Analog Inputs: Six (3.3 V max)

Peripheral Support:

• Provides the hardware and firmware support for connecting the following external peripherals (peripherals themselves are not included)

1. Neopixel smart LED strips
2. GPS sensor
3. One additional I2C port via Qwiic/Stemma QT connector (easy to connect additional sensors from Sparkfun or Adafruit)

Compatibility: Only uses 2 pins (SDA and SCL) of the Feather board

Optional Accessory: RoverWing Top

The Top board is an optional accessory for the RoverWing that provides a power switch, small prototyping area, three NeoPixel LEDs, buttons, and a 3-line OLED display. Some soldering is required (namely, you will need to solder the wires to the switch terminals). Check the User Guide for further description.

It is funded in CrowdSupply, you can order it now if you are interested in it!