Low-cost micro-ROS/LiDAR/Motor drivers board available commercially

General
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Hello,

I have designed, manufactured and made available commercially a low-cost all-in-one board for beginners building DIY robots capable of ROS2/Nav2 mapping, navigation, SLAM and frontier exploration. Everything is open source.

This board has a 2D LiDAR port, 2 channel DC 12/24V motor drivers. Think of this PCB as a miniature robot “motherboard” for building small differential two-wheel educational LiDAR robots. Out-of-the-box firmware, ROS2 packages and starter robot body for easy robot building are provided as well.

brushed_dc_motors_pcb_for_esp32_doit_DevKit_v1_30pin_BDC_30P_front_left
brushed_dc_motors_pcb_for_esp32_doit_DevKit_v1_30pin_BDC_30P_front_left1200×1200 316 KB

The board accepts an ESP32 development board and runs micro-ROS for Arduino connected over WiFi to a local PC running ROS2 Iron. Here is an example interfacing this board to a LiDAR and two N20 encoder motors.

BDC_30P_usage
BDC_30P_usage1920×1923 199 KB

Here is a video example of what you can build in action, running glorious Nav2 and frontier exploration.

The board comes with the following:

  • off-the-shelf firmware
    • firmware supports ~15 2D LiDAR models
    • firmware supports both brushed and brushless motors
  • a starter 120mm 3D printed robot body design that you can 3D print yourself
  • ROS2 Iron PC software (Ubuntu and Windows) using Docker and direct install
  • step-by-step video instruction series for beginners
    • covering assembly, software/firmware setup, bring-up and operation including mapping, SLAM, autonomous navigation and autonomous frontier exploration
  • the board features include
    • an integrated motor power supply (12V default, configurable to 24V) for stable motor power across a wide range of battery discharge voltage
    • an integrated 5V regulated power supply for the 2D LiDAR and ESP32
    • a battery voltage monitoring circuit (using ESP32 built-in ADC)
  • board power specs
    • motor voltage Vmot options 12V default, 24V selectable
    • alkaline batteries power
    • protected rechargeable batteries can be used with additional precautions
    • board input voltage range Vbatt 6V to 21V
    • Vbatt 6V to 10V for Vmot=12V motor voltage
    • Vbatt 6V to 21V for Vmot=24V motor voltage
    • Max total motors current 3A
    • Max total motors battery draw 2A
    • Individual motor current limit 2.2A (driver IC built-in protection)
    • 5V supply max output current 3.5A
    • Max total battery draw 3A
  • two board version are available
    • BDC-30P compatible with 30-pin ESP32 development kit modules
    • BDC-38C4 compatible with 38-pin ESP32 DevKitC V4

Extensive troubleshooting instructions and a technical support forum are available as help resources.

I hope this robot board can be useful for the ROS community.

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this is one of the best low cost ROS robotics I have seen. This , combined with the documentation is exactly what a beginner needs to learn ROS. Thanks so much, im going to order these parts and try this robot! One question, do you have plans to open source the board files? Reason is then we can get them made directly via jlcpcb..etc. And also its cool to learn the architecture of the electronics as well.

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Hi Anupam,

thank you for your kind words. Yes, at some point I can release board files for other users to fabricate this product.

Ilia

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