Electronics community development

Welcome to our community! It's great that you are here, your contributions are very much needed.

Electronics is an integral part of pib. Electronics include motors, sensors, control circuitry and any electronic components used in pib. Electronic stack is explained simply in the next section.

How is pib’s Electronic system structured?

pib to be represented as a collection of sensors and actuators that are controlled with electronic drivers which is then controlled by a low level microcontroller controlled by pib’s computer.

|-Raspberry Pi (Main computer including all required software and controlling all child components)
|--Oak-d-lite (AI camera with an onboard chip to run calculations onboard thus reducing stress on Raspberry Pi)
|--TinkerForge pi hat (low level microcontroller that acts as the intermediary between the main computer and motor drivers)
|---TinkerForge servo bricklet V2 (driver board controlling servo motors according to instructions given from parent computer)

Now moving forward from the control electronics. pib uses pwm servo motors to actuate all joints and powers the system using a power supply providing 7.5V 6A.

How to develop pib’s Electronics?

Our development process is thoroughly explained in this page https://pib-rocks.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/kb/pages/66158593 . From the Electronics side there is no exact process unlike CAD since its a more wide topic however, for ease of explanation we will take an example ticket that has been already done and explain how it was done.

Step 1: Read and understand a ticket from the “Ready” column that interests you and matches your skill level. Then assign yourself to it	Step 2: Researching and retrieving power specifications of used components in pib from their datasheets
PR-246: Power consumption calculations to prevent power breaksDone	Shown here is datasheet for MG996R servo motor used to actuate pib’s fingers
Step 3: Use physical measurement tools like multimeters and/or software measurement tools like brick viewer to measure actual power usage for components	Step 4: Document findings and write conclusions of such calculations in a confluence page
	Power consumption in pib
Step 5: Move ticket to verify by team to discuss in weekly meeting and double check calculations	Step 6: Move ticket to done and create necessary tickets to implement changes according to findings

What are some exciting topics we are working on for next version?

Design of Cycloidal drives to improve pib’s motor skills
Migrating from a plugin power supply to a battery power source
Improvement of pib’s motors and sensors

How to start contributing?

Step 1 (You are here🙂): Read and navigate through this knowledge base to have a good grasp in pib’s mechatronics development and join Discord to observe how other members develop and interact.

Step 2: Attend weekly rockstar meetings, where we discuss tickets, progress with tasks, brainstorm and create new tasks, onboard new members and chat geeky stuff 😉 (Every Wednesday, 2:30pm CET)

Step 3: Choose 1 of the low priority tickets to start with and walk through the development process, explained above. And don’t forget to reach out in Discord channels and to pibRockstars for any questions💡

Working on the Electronics of a humanoid robot involves lots of open questions and great opportunities for new additions and findings in such field. We call them pib open questions. We are very welcoming to research groups or universities interested in solving one of these questions as a research project, adding a new question and using pib as a research platform. Even as an individual, you are very welcome to propose or select an open question to base your BSc. or MSc. thesis on.

Design of an opensource low-cost actuator for pib
Synthetic skin with haptic feedback for pib
Exploration of different electronic control systems for pib

Please reach out by email to us for such technical collaboration opportunities.

XYZ@isento.de