SolderingTutorial VS rp2040-motor-controller

Hey, look up the NE555 chip. It's tiny and I know it from this build that is kind of a stress-test for soldering skills. It's a timing chip, so depending on which of the little legs you connect the LED to, those will blink with different frequencies. Up to 5 different frequencies are possible, but I'm not sure you can put more than one LED on a given leggie without transistors inbetween. You'll need to check the power draw against the NE555 Datasheet.

Thank you, yes. Here is a blog post with more information about what we are doing [1] and a direct link to our funding page [2]. We are working on moving to a fully donation supported engineering model so our work can be freely available for everyone the world over, and your monthly contributions make a big difference. Also here is our github with our electronics, software, and hardware designs all permissively licensed. [3] Notably our open source dual brushless motor controller design is coming along nicely. [4]

[1] https://community.twistedfields.com/t/join-the-solar-farming...

[2] https://opencollective.com/twisted-fields-research-collectiv...

[3] https://github.com/Twisted-Fields

[4] https://github.com/Twisted-Fields/rp2040-motor-controller

I learned PCB design on Eagle, switched to Kicad about 5 years ago, and in the last three years have really been doing a LOT of PCB design with Kicad. I love it so much!

Here's a board I designed recently, which can be viewed online in the amazing Kicanvas viewer:

https://kicanvas.org/?github=https://github.com/Twisted-Fiel...

Kicad is so amazing. Extremely powerful tool with no imposed limits that is completely free and widely used.

I just finished the third rev of my open source low cost high power brushless motor controller in kicad. Open formats means Thea Flowers was able to make a beautiful web viewer that takes a GitHub link to a kicad board or schematic file and displays it for ya. You can see my new board in your browser right here:

https://kicanvas.org/?github=https://github.com/Twisted-Fiel...

I also recently designed a PCB for a friends art project where I needed to place a bunch of LEDs in concentric rings. I used a nice python library for kicad board files to generate a board with all the LEDs placed, then imported the rest of my components and continued with layout as normal.

But beyond the fact that it’s a high quality tool, and has easy to manipulate and read open formats, and loads of easy to use third party tools, is the fact that kicad is and always will be free and open source. That means that when I make my boards open source (and all of my work is open source), I know anyone anywhere in the world can download kicad and use the designs.

I used altium to design some boards at google. It’s clearly a powerful tool. If that’s already what you know, you don’t want to share your designs or collaborate with others who don’t have altium, and you have a license, then go ahead and use it. Or if you want to get a job at a large firm that likely uses altium, then go learn the tool. But if you want to learn a PCB tool for 99% of hobbyist and a good deal of professional work, kicad is likely a better choice.

Hello everyone, I am the developer and maintainer of this open source farming robot, and I just published our most significant video yet, along with this companion article. I explain the rationale for operating our project as a non profit, explain how 3D printers inspired this approach, and talk about how we hope to empower farmers and communities worldwide through crowd-funded support. I would love to hear your feedback and discussion about our ideas.

I know many of you will be interested in our github, so here's the link:

https://github.com/Twisted-Fields

One of our contributions I am particularly excited about is our open source motor controller. Off the shelf controllers are expensive and require add on boards to fully integrate with our system. Last year we decided to design our own so we can make one board that does everything we need for about $40. Here's the in progress design:

https://github.com/Twisted-Fields/rp2040-motor-controller

We also support running our code in simulation with a single docker command, though to be honest that is probably broken at the moment as I am ripping things apart for the new version. Still you might find it interesting:

https://github.com/Twisted-Fields/acorn-precision-farming-ro...

Thank you so much!

So maybe look up VESC or this: https://github.com/Twisted-Fields/rp2040-motor-controller

I’m doing an open source solar powered farming robot nonprofit thing! [1] It’s an amazing feeling finishing a huge PCB design project for work and then immediately pushing the changes to GitHub. I’ve got a new brushless motor controller in the works that costs under $40 per board fully assembled for high current dual motor control, and anyone can order them (ideally wait till design is slightly more mature). [2]

[1] https://community.twistedfields.com/t/march-2022-update-simu...

[2] https://github.com/Twisted-Fields/rp2040-motor-controller