A list of resources, projects and products useful for robot electronics

If you have additions, please open an issue or pull request.

Open Source Modules & Subsystem

Motor drivers

• VESC - Brushless DC Motor controller
• Cheap FOCer 2 - Low-cost VESC 6-based Brushless DC Motor Controller
• OpenBLDC - Open-BLDC stands for Open Source Brush Less DC Motor Controller.
• HighPower-Mechaduino - Closed Loop Stepper Servo (50V@10A)
• motor-control-board - CVRA DC-Motor Driver, using STM32F3, supports CAN Bus and was designed using KiCAD
• MotCtrl - A BLDC motor controller
• OtterControl - OtterControl BLDC motor controller
• stmbl - High-Voltage AC Servo Driver
• RCA's µMotor - control any BLDC and DC motor up to 250W
• Brushless DC motor controller board - Dan Strother's STM32f103 based BLDC controller Board
• Closed Loop Motor Controller - Step/Dir input for CNC use. Based on PSoC4.
• DC Servomotor Controller - DC-Motor driver build around an AVR.
• STM_MotorController - Of Robot Design and Control Lab @ CIT
• ODrive & ODriveROS2 - High performance motor control (later versions /wo open HW)
• Simple FOC variety of boards available
• rp2040-motor-controller - Based on RP2040 chip
• Dagor - ESP32-based brushless controller that has an on-board magnetic encoder
• Betzdrive - BLDC Controler for ditributed multi-axis Systems (see also Blue)

Actuators

• Mechaduino - Closed Loop Stepper Servo
• OpenTorque Actuator - Joint for legged robots
• 3D Printed Robot Actuator - Motorcontroller + BLDC + cycloidal gearbox and position feedback
• DirectServo - Robotic joint controller with BLDC driver and magnetic encoder.
• Moteus - Joint Controller and quadruped robot design
• ServoProject - A RC-Servo retrofit (new electronics, sensors and firmware)

Computer Vision

• OpenMV - OpenMV, an embedded CV Module (CMOS Sensor with STM32)
• PX4Flow - PX4Flow, Optical Flow Sensor

Battery Management

• DieBieMS - DieBieMS (3-12S LiIon-based, 100A)
• LibreSolar Project - with different sized BMS BMS Li-Ion 5S, BMS Li-Ion 48V
• Ceech's BMS - Arduino-based 5S BMS (BQ76920)
• Battman BMS - Li-Ion BMS (LTC6803)
• ENNOID - BMS FW GUI - Modular BMS based on LTC68XX & STM32 MCU for up to 400V EV battery pack
• foxBMS (Github) - Modular BMS (many chemistries, many cells) foxbms.org
• Green BMS - Modular BMS, for many chemistries

FPGA based

• LOA - Loa is a framework designed to build specialized IO subsystems.
• Snickerdoodle - Snickerdoodle is a Zynq based System-on-Module
• Logi-Bone - FPGA & Beaglebone, also some VHDL modules relevant to robotics available
• flink - Universal interface to FPGA's. Includes some IP-Cores for robotics.

Bus Systems

• SAB - Sensor Actuator Bus (SAB), also in modm.io
• OpenCyphal - (formerly UAVCAN) Protocol on top of CAN Bus, suited for robotics and aerospace control applications
• UC4H: UAVCAN for Hobbyists (on GitHub) - UAVCAN applied to a multirotor plattform.
• Simple Robot - RPI4 & EtherCAT
• Lely CANopen - Open Source CANopen Stack
• CANopenNode - Another Open Source CANopen Stack
• CANopen driver framework for ROS - CANOpen ROS bridge
• KaCanOpen - an easy-to-use CANopen stack for ROS

Sensors

• OpenSimpleLidar - Open Hardware scanning laser rangefinder
• OSLRF-01 - An open source laser range sensor using time-of-flight
• Xaxxon OpenLIDAR - DIY Scanning Lidar

Projects with open and reuseable designs

Open Source Project

• Reachy humanoid robot, remote teleoperation using virtual reality.
• MORPH on GitHub - Modular platform for open robotics development. Supports ROS and uses VESC.
• Evezor - Evezor is an open source SCARA class robotic manufacturing platform
• Octanis Rover - Octanis Rover Projects Electronics
• OAP - Open Automaton Project (Source Repo inactive since 2008)
• Linorobot - A suite of Open Source ROS compatible robots GIT
• Bobble-Bot - Demo robot for real-time control using Rpi, RT Linux, and ROS.
• StanfordDoggoProject - 8-DoF quadruped robot
• Open Dynamic Robot Initiative - 8/12-Dof Walker, fast multi-axis force control, bldc-drivers
• Hoverboard + ROS - Provides ROS support for modified hoverboard, to provide a differential drive plattform. Uses this modified firmware.
• Hello Robot - Mobile robot mit manipulation capabilities, also: Github.
• nanosaur - 🦕 nanosaur is a little tracked robot ROS2 enabled, made for an NVIDIA Jetson Nano

Robot Competitions

• CVRA - CVRA's Github repositories (Eurobot Team)
• RCA - RCA Github repositories (Eurobot Team)
• APBTeam - A Eurobot Team with opensource robot design

University Projects, Thesis work, etc.

• Litter Bot - Autonomous litter collecting robot (using OpenCV, Rpi and AVR)
• Zynq + OV7670 - Student project using Zynq and image sensor (OV7670)