Gold Rush Robotics — IEEE Southeastcon 2024

Gold Rush Robotics competed in the IEEE Southeastcon 2024 Hardware Competition in Atlanta, Georgia.

Custom PCB Design

The headline engineering work this year was a custom PCB I designed in KiCAD that served as the robot’s central nervous system. The board connected the raspberry pi to all of the motors and sensors

the board handled:

• Power managment
• I2C breakout
• serial communication with Roboclaw motor drivers

From Competition to ROSCon

The desire for a better transport layer for this robot became the basis for a talk at ROSCon 2024 in Odense, Denmark — demonstrating Micro-ROS running over CAN-FD as a general-purpose transport for embedded ROS2 nodes.