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Kinisi controller v0.4 is heading into production!

· 2 min read
Sergey Zolotykh
Sergey Zolotykh
VsReality

Kinisi controller v0.4 has gone into production! We're excited to take the next step and bring this new board to life.

KiCad 3D render of the Kinisi controller v0.4 board

What's exciting about v0.4?​

  • Smarter motor drivers. New DRV8873S drivers add SPI settings, fault reporting, and current sensing for each motor channel. That gives the controller more information about what the motors are doing.
  • Motion sensing on the board. A BMI088 accelerometer and gyroscope give your robot a way to measure movement and rotation.
  • Temperature sensing and lasting memory. A TMP102 measures board temperature, and FRAM can keep settings and data when power is off.
  • More ways to connect. USB-C, UART, I²C, and eight GPIO pins give you room to add sensors and other hardware.

Kinisi still brings four brushed DC motor channels and four encoder inputs together on one board. Encoder feedback lets a controller track how far and how fast each motor turns.

The board also includes a replaceable fuse, reverse-polarity protection, and a TVS diode for short motor-power transients.

What's next?​

The next step is to bring up and test the manufactured boards. v0.4 uses a new motor-control interface and pin map, so it needs firmware made for this revision before driving motors. We'll share more as testing progresses.

The image above is a fresh KiCad render of the board design. Follow along at VsReality Robotics on Instagram.

What would you build with four motor channels?