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

To use the BTT Octopus board for our application, you will need to install custom firmware onto the board. This firmware is a derivative of Marlin firmware, tailored to our specific purpose.

The steps below will walk you through installing the firmware onto a micro SD card.

1. Format your micro SD card to be in FAT32. Plug the SD card into your laptop. You may need to use a micro SD to SD adapter, or a micro SD to USB adapter. Right click on the SD card in your file explorer. Click Format and select FAT32. Accept all other defaults. You can rename the card to be “CTR” or something similar.

<aside> 📎 Note that you can only format SD cards that are 32GB or less to be in this format. FAT32 format is required for the firmware to load correctly on the board.

</aside>

1. Download the firmware.bin file and copy it to the SD card. Eject the SD card from your computer and remove it.

firmware.bin

1. With the control board powered off, insert the SD card into the slot.
2. Plug in the board power and connect the board to your computer vis USB. Open your Device Manager and verify that you have a new USB Device attached to one of your COM ports.

That’s it for firmware installation! Next, we need to attach the board to the robot and manage all of the wires.