Robotics teams are often short of cash, and off-the-shelf hardware solutions are expensive. In 2025 I designed and built a printed circuit board meant to control addressable LED strips whilst utilizing the CAN protocol for communication, which we could use on our competition robot, and which other robotics teams could make or have made for use on their own robots. My primary goal was to create a controller that was considerably less expensive than the other available options while retaining many of the same capabilities and being completely open source.
My presentation will act as a Do-It-Yourself guide to developing open source hardware solutions, following the path I took. I will go through the process of identifying a need for a piece of hardware, determining desired capabilities, designing and testing a breadboard prototype, designing and testing an initial design, identifying key areas of improvement, and then redesigning. I will finish by describing the process of writing code for hardware, and open sourcing the hardware solution(s) and code.
