Open Source Hardware Platforms

We live in very exciting times 😃! BLDC motors are entering the hobby community more and more and many great projects have already emerged leveraging their far superior dynamics and power capabilities. BLDC motors have numerous advantages over regular DC motors but they have one big disadvantage, the complexity of control. Even though it has become relatively easy to design and manufacture PCBs and create our own hardware solutions for driving BLDC motors the proper low-cost solutions are yet to come. One of the reasons for this is the apparent complexity of writing the BLDC driving algorithms, Field oriented control (FOC) being an example of one of the most efficient ones. The solutions that can be found online are almost exclusively very specific for certain hardware configurations and the microcontroller architecture used. Additionally, most of the efforts at this moment are still channeled towards the high-power applications of the BLDC motors and proper low-cost FOC.

This project aims to develop a colour-based vision processing system for use in RoboCup. We are using a CCD camera for input to an FPGA. The system locates coloured objects and outputs detected corners.

Applications involving data acquisition from sensors need samples at a preset frequency rate, the filtering out of noise and/or analysis of certain frequency components. We propose a novel software architecture based on open-software hardware platforms which allows programmers to create data streams from input channels and easily implement filters and frequency analysis objects. The performances of the different classes given in the size of memory allocated and execution time (number of clock cycles) were analyzed in the low-cost platform Arduino-Genuino. This library is free to use for research. Please cite above publication.

SSEPlus is a SIMD function library. It provides optimized emulation for newer SSE instructions. It also provides a rich set of high performance routines for common operations such as arithmetic, bitwise logic, and data packing and unpacking.

The OS561 operating system based around FORTH/Java. The OS is to run on a VHDL chip OpenHardware design called the Minon, but could become available for other platforms. The unique point of the design is a revolutionary data compression technology.