Interface Board

I’m not exactly sure what to call this board, so maybe I’ll just talk about what it does. This board supports a SOM (in this case a raspberry pi compute module 4) and breaks out a number of communication interfaces so a user can access it directly via a display/keyboard, via a ssh session over a UART port or over a ethernet network. The idea is that this board can talk with various CAN bus enabled hardware devices (such as my various CAN bus enabled motor driver boards) and can push commands, receive data from them. Being able to run a Linux distro means there is lots of freedom with how i want to control the down stream motor drivers.

In many ways this board is similar to a regular rpi board in that it has alot of the same interfaces, however there are a few differences
-This board takes 12V input, which is usefull as all moy motor driver boards also take 12V input
-This board has a SPI-to-CAN bus converter chip (MCP2515) along with a CAN bus transceiver allowing for CAN bus communication (rpi boards don’t support CAN bus natively)
-This Board has a i2s audio amplifier so a 4W speaker can be plugged in for audio output
-The SD card isn’t on the default SDIO bus which means i can use the CM4 modules with eMMC on board memory as well as an external SD card
-I’ve broken out the PCIe bus to a connector on the back of the board which gives a number of options for expanding the hardware later.

The board also supports having a CSI camera attached as well as having 2 USB Ports, so there are lots of options for using this board as the brain of a robot or similar.