In order to develop a high performing football robot, fully custom PCBs needed to be designed. Our CAD Designers have been working a lower and upper PCB optimized for space, weight, performance and user-friendliness. After designing the PCBs, they need to be professionally manufactured. We reached out to Eurocircuits and they were happy to make our PCBs a reality.
Our PCBs have a distinct shape in line with the 3D printed frame of the robot. Our lower PCB has many purposes, phototransistors in combination with neopixels are present for fast line detection on the soccer playing field. Motor controllers are present for adequate and impulsive movement, various voltage regulators providing the necessary voltages to the different components and a powerful microcontroller make everything work together. An integrated bluetooth module is present to communicate with a second soccer robot and used for realtime software debugging. The Upper PCB contains IR Receivers to find the IR beaconed football, an orientation sensor, status lights and a camera module to detect the goals, lines and opponents on the football field. We have chosen to make our robots highly modular, this enables us to futureproof our designs and increases the repairability and maintenance of our robots.
Our lower PCBs have already been finalized and manufactured by Eurocircuits. They enabled us to make our ideas a reality of which we are very thankful!
