Servo Controller Firmware

This is a servo controller firmware for our custom STM32 Feather board and CAN adapter. It was designed to be a servo/PWM controller for our small testbed Sidewinder/Marlin.

Features

• Support for different boats via header files / define at the top of main.c
• Receives CAN motor commands from ROS (same addresses as our other boat robooter, making this plug and play with our software stack)
• Does some simple scaling and plausibility checks on received values (so you don't have to calibrate the RC or boat computer)
• Reads PWM from multichannel Remote Control receiver, with an efficient use of timer inputs
• Switches over between RC and CAN control based on RC PWM switch (hard override for the boat computer)
• "Heartbeat" blinking LED
• Reports to USB host as a virtual serial port (115200 8N1), can print verbose debugging messages (toggle via define in source code)

Programming

• Program using USB DFU mode (preferred) or UART
• Download & install STM32CubeProgrammer

USB

• Make sure that Boot0 is set to high (connect the middle pin and the pin closer to the STM of the boot jumper)
  • Reset/power cycle STM32 to (re-)boot in programming mode (or re-plug USB cable)
  • It should show up as something with DFU in the name in lsusb.
  • USB port should show up in the CubeProg drop down
  • Click connect, you should now see the chip info in the bottom right corner
• Build firmware in CubeIDE
• Go to the second tab of CubeProg, browser for the firmware .elf file
• "Run after programming" will directly reboot STM in run mode, even if jumper is still set to programming mode

UART

• You can use a nucleo programmer in UART mode or any other 3.3V UART adapter
• Connect UART adapter to any of the UART ports of the STM
• Proceed like with USB, select the port in CubeProg

Public links

Public git repository

PCB files

Internal Links:

Link to PCB files on the Nextcloud

Internal wiki page with more information about the boats

Internal git repository