[robocup-small] Question about the control board.

[Andre Ryll]

Hi David,

I am not sure if I understood your question correctly, as it is a bit 
twofold. As Erik said, and I totally agree, all teams design their own 
electronics. There is no store (as far as I know) where you could 
readily buy such parts conforming to our leagues requirements.
You also mention how to acquire the boards, so I guess you mean the 
manufacturing process? There are multiple options. You could make them 
yourself at home, but that is very cumbersome and you would be limited 
to two layers. And even that is already very difficult. It is much more 
common to let a professional PCB company manufacture the boards. There 
are quite a lot of online stores for that, even for small numbers and 
prototypes. The part placement is a different story. Due to our size 
constraints in the league you will most probably need to go for SMD 
parts. You can solder most of them by hand if you have some experience 
and a steady hand. Even packages down to 0.5mm pitch or no-lead packages 
(QFN) can be soldered by hand or with hot air. In our team, we have 
recently gone for the full service and also let a company do the 
placement for us. Hand-made is cool for the first prototypes, but not 
fun for some 10 robots.

To help the advancement of the league and to aid newcommers (or teams 
redesigning) we publish our whole software, hardware, electronics, and 
firmware usually after each world championship. You can find all 
releases here:
https://tigers-mannheim.de/index.php?id=29

I hope that gives you a good start :)

Cheers,

Andre Ryll
Founder & Project Leader of
TIGERs Mannheim

Am 17.02.2015 um 01:35 schrieb Erik Schluntz:
> Hi David,
> I think all the teams make the boards themselves.
> Has anyone opensourced their schematics? RFC Cambridge is also in the 
> middle of an electronics redesign, and that could be helpful :)
> - Erik
>
> On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 4:02 PM, Sheynkman, David <das52 at njit.edu 
> <mailto:das52 at njit.edu>> wrote:
>
>     Hello there. I understand that to power the robots and to control
>     the motors, we need a control board which is where the power and
>     electric components are. I've seen multiple examples of the boards
>     from different websites and the electrical circuits that were
>     made.  however, my issue is that I don't know where to acquire
>     these boards from.  Did the teams make it themselves or were they
>     purchased from somewhere?  Thank you very much.
>
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>
> -- 
> Erik Schluntz
> 301 520 5019
> Harvard University
>
>
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