Breakout Boards for Cost-Effective Swerve

Technical Electrical
1

I designed some boards for a cost effective swerve. The idea was to use Neo+sparkmax on steer, with a pwm encoder to sidestep a bunch of expensive can sensors.

Sensor boards can be purchased from jlcpcb for 10$ a pop, have good mounting holes, and use molex SLs for a good locking connection. JLC manufacturing isn’t perfect, so watch out for misaligned chips.

A new breakout board for the sparkmax was designed as the existing one interferes with the sparkmax mounting features. Again, molex SLs.

As a bonus, I added a can board for the kraken so if you go to lugs for power, you can still use a molex SLs for can.

Pics (LED color chosen to minimize attractiveness)

collage
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Files are available here, CAD software used was kiCAD. I have tested the boards (minus the Kraken board for obvious reasons) and everything seems to work, but I make no promises.

7 Likes
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Have you thought about using Fabrication Toolkit for KiCAD to generate the assembly files? I didnt see them in your repository.

Also, consider adding TVS diodes everywhere and making the mounting holes compatible with CANcoders (if you haven’t already).

Looks great, a good alternative to TTB encoders or AS5600 breakouts.