Nice Rover!
As for RPI and Teensy Hat - and to not take over Jwatte's thread
Background: <probably ignore>
I keep meaning to get back to working with a Rover. I have an older Lynxmotion (now part of RobotShop) Rover from several years ago, plus one that Orion Robotics (no longer making) was doing for a short time. A couple of years ago I tried out using an RPI2 on my Lynxmotion Rover...
Again I would like to get back to it. One of my primary goals for it will be to hopefully get a better understanding of ROS. I have done some stuff with ROS on a hexapod, but I believe a Rover would be more suitable for it... Currently not sure if I will build up my own setup or start from a ROS turtlebot setup, which may either be the new TurtleBot 3 by Robotis or a 2i from Trossen.
But I may also instead or in addition I am thinking of building up a Rover. Not sure which one I will start from. The Orion one might be fun, but I was having issues of parts (like wheels) falling off...
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If I start building up Rover to use with ROS, electronically my current setup would be:
An RPI like host, might be RPI3, more likely Odroid (either Xu4 or C2) or UP board (small PC with RPI form factor)
To control the motors, I will use one or two RoboClaws (
http://www.ionmc.com/) - Note ionmc is owned by the same people who did Orion Robotics and BasicMicro... These servo motor controllers handle the motors plus encoders.
Will probably have a Teensy HAT, as there are lots of things you might want to do, like control servos, read in sensors... The hat I showed in the other thread, has stuff on it like a Pololu DC/DC converter to handle converting the Lipo 3s (could be 4s) to 5v to power both the hat and the host. Also AX Servo control, Amplifier that works of DAC0, a couple switches, LEDS, one neopixel, several IO pins setup with three pin headers, plus a set of jumpers, to connect different parts of the RPI to the Teensy. Example the uart on the RPI connector connects up to one of the UARTS on the Teensy. I have it also setup for SPI pins (did a little testing), maybe I2C pins (have not tried them yet)...
Once I set this up on either Rover or Hexapod, will then figure out which processor to use to handle thins like IMU. Easiest would be for RPI(UP) handle it if there is already a ROS node to handle it, but may want to move to Teensy... Likewise for some other components.
There are a few threads up here as well as on Trossen that talk about some of these boards. Example:
http://forums.trossenrobotics.com/s...-Yet-Another-Teensy-Board-D&p=75892#post75892
I should warn I am a software guy not a hardware guy, my last EE like class was probably over 35 years ago and I only do these boards for my own experimentation. So I would trust others like jwatte for a more complete design... But I usually keep versions of some of the different boards up at:
https://github.com/KurtE/Teensy3.1-Breakout-Boards
For all of the boards there are DipTrace design files and for many of them there is a zip file that has all of the gerber files necessary to have built at places like oshpark...