Materials and CAD Files

Structural Components

Electronics and Motors

Hardware

Custom Part Files

Tube Materials

Assembly Guides

Custom Part Manufacturing Guide

Full System Assembly

Cart Assembly

Tube Fabrication

Electronics Setup

Electronics Board Setup

Firmware Installation

Wire Management

Full System Test

Kinematics

Calculating Kinematics of a CTR

Implementing Kinematics

Troubleshooting Kinematics

Experiments

Installing Tubes

Homing the Robot

Graph Paper In-Plane Bending Experiment

Out-of-Plane Rotation Experiment

On this page, we will cover how to configure the BigTree Tech Octopus V1.1 board for our application. This guide will cover all that you need to know for this project, but here is the full user manual for the board.

BigTree Octupus User Manual.pdf

Board Assembly

The next few steps will ask you to remove several jumper pins. The image below shows some pins that are connected by a jumper and some pins that are not connected by a jumper.

1. Remove board from box. It will come out of the box with pins in this orientation.

1. Remove the MCU jumper pin. This pin enables power over USB-C when the board is connected to a computer. We will be using an external power source, so you do not need this pin.

<aside> 🚨

If do not remove this pin, you can potentially fry the entire board when you connect it to external power. Make sure the pin is REMOVED before proceeding.

</aside>

1. Configure the stepper motor driver pins to be in UART mode. They come in SPI mode. You will need to remove all but the second from left jumper pins. Make sure you are holding the board in the same orientation as the image below.

1. Assemble the stepper motor drivers by adding a heat sink. Remove the blue paper from the bottom of the heat sink and stick it into the top of the motor driver. Insert the motor driver onto the board. There should only be one orientation where all of the pins from the driver fit into the board.

1. Separate and strip two 70mm sections of 18 AWG wire. Take out one female power jack connector.

1. Use the wires to connect the power jack terminal to the motor and board power. Connect the two red wires to the positive terminal of the power jack. Connect the two black wires to the negative terminal of the power jack. One of the red wires should go to the positive motor power terminal, and one should go to the positive board power terminal. One black wire goes to the negative motor power terminal, and one goes to the negative board power terminal. See the image below.

   <aside> 📎 You will need to lift up the red plastic terminal cover. This will give you access to the terminal screws.

   </aside>

Your board is now assembled! Next, we need to install firmware.