Wild Thumper Controller Board

Description: This controller board is built by Dagu specifically for their robot platforms. It essentially combines an Arduino development board with a dual H-bridge motor driver all bolted down to an aluminum heatsink. The heart of the board is an ATMega168 AVR microcontroller which comes loaded with the Arduino bootloader and some simple control code. Code can be easily accessed and changed in the Arduino IDE using the on-board FTDI chip and mini-USB connector. All of the headers on board are accompanied by ground and voltage lines to allow for easy servo connection.

The controller allows for on board charging of SLA, NiCd or NiMh battery packs and has a dedicated barrel jack socket for DC input. A 5 Amp LDO voltage regulator handles the step-down from standard 7.2 or 7.4v RC battery packs. A set of screw terminals are provided for the battery connection as well as for connecting external devices (5 volt regulated out).

The motor controller side is made up of dual 15A FET H-bridges with fuse protection. A blown fuse is detected by the microcontroller and indicated by an on-board LED. Screw terminals are populated and clearly marked for left and right. All of the FETs are bolted down to the aluminum heatsink and electrically isolated with thermal tape.

This board is ready to go out-of-the-box! The supplied code will accept input from a standard RC vehicle receiver and handle the mixing for differential steering. If you would rather control it with Serial or I2C input, that can be done simply by downloading the proper Arduino sketch and changing a few constants (its programmed in!). Also, because it is an Arduino compatible controller, feel free to write your own control scheme or even load it up with sensors and go autonomous! Seven general-use digital pins are broken out on the board as well as 5 ADC pins and the ISP header. Uploading code is as simple as selecting Arduino Pro or Pro Mini (5V, 16MHz) w/ ATMega168” under the boards menu in the Arduino IDE.

Dimensions: 4" x 2 3/8" x 1 ¼"

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