Sensors

Newly developed, compatible with Open-Cube. UART communication, similar to EV3 sensors

Currently two sensors were developed and manufactured in a small series of 30 (LIDAR) and 50 (RGB-optical) pieces.

We plan to make at least two more: an ultrasonic sensor – basically an adaptor board for cheap HC-SR04 RCWL-9610 modules and simple touch sensor

LIDAR – laser distance sensor

Based on ST.com VL53L1 – Time-of-Flight (ToF) ranging sensor – can measure distance from 40 mm up to 3000 mm or more.

VL53L1CB sensor block diagram by st.com. The sensor offers huge amount of features, currently we use just simple single object ranging with two possible field of view settings.

KiCAD 3D model – helps to properly design the whole sensor

KiCAD 3D model exported into CAD software for more precise package design

Photo of the fully assembled sensor – PCB manufactured and SMD components soldered by JLCPCB.com, connectors were soldered in-house.

LASER ToF rangefinders in the 3D printed box

Optical reflective sensor, color sensor

A classic sensor for a line-following robot, any object detection or color recognition….

In this version, the external switching transistors used in v.0 have been replaced by available multiple GPIOs connected in parallel, configured as open-collector outputs and controlled “synchronously” via direct writes to the BSRR registers. The bigger STM32G030K8 was used instead of the J6 (SOIC-8) version because it was available in stock at jlcpcb, where the manufacturing was relatively cheap (when compared for example with allpcb).