We are Poivron Robotique, a team of two with some more member depending of the years, doing robots for the French Robot Cup (Eurobot) since 2010, but with a break between 2016 and 2021. Today we are much older than the average competitor, we are also the founders of the Robotic club of our small town (Riom, France) and bring a team of 9 kids to the French Robot Cup Junior. And I hope they will present one or two boards here this year!
In 2024, the French Robot Cup introduced the SIMAs (Small Independent mobile actuators) small and autonomous robot. Ours, based on a Raspberry Pi Pico - RP2040 micro-controller, a L293 H-bridge were both simple and quite effective thanks to their encoder on the motors.
This year, just before the summer, we received an invitation for the associations fair of our town with the request to have an interactive exhibition. Our SIMAs are cute - being totally objective - but they are not interactive.
Just before the summer, we received an invitation for the associations fair of our town with the request to have an interactive exhibition. Our SIMAs are cute - being totally objective - but they are not interactive.
Sometimes you don’t need a very compact, high-power, or very powerful board. Sometimes, what you need is 6 buttons with a micro-controller to interface the rest of the robot.
So we open our favorite PCB editor again - Kicad - and got back to work!
We won’t share the schematic file, because it is ugly.
We won’t share the PCB file, because it is worse.
But the board we received from Aisler are awesome !
No big fail here, no great electronic success. But we received the boards in time, in the middle of the summer, where able to assemble them, test them (on some 4 and 7 year old kids) and we were really happy to have many young girls and boys playing with our robots during the associations fair! It would have worked so well without the right position of the button and the indication on the silkscreen !
The ability to have dual face board, one with most components and connectors, the other with the buttons and the silkscreen was the nice feature here (even if it’s a standard since years)!
This SIMAs were loved by the public who played with them!
So, thank you Aisler !