Pika Spark - a Cyphal first micro robot control system

General
1

Hi everyone :coffee: :wave:

For quite some time I’ve been working on the Pika Spark, which is a Arduino Portenta X8 based micro robot control system combining an unprecedented amount of computing power and interfaces within an extremely small form factor.

Naturally Cyphal is going to be a first-class citizen :wink: .

2023-09-19-Pika-Spark-Top-Info-Rev-3
2023-09-19-Pika-Spark-Top-Info-Rev-31920×1326 153 KB

Computing

NXP i.MX 8M Mini Processor running Yocto Linux with ROS2 in Docker.

  • 4 x ARM Cortex-A53 up to 1.8 GHz / core
  • 1 x ARM Cortex-M4 up to 400 MHz
  • 2GB low power DDR4 DRAM
  • 16GB eMMC flash module

STM32H747XI Micro-Control-Unit running bare-metal firmware for real-time applications.

  • Cortex-M7 core up to 480 MHz with double-precision FPU
  • Cortex-M4 core up to 240 MHz with FPU
  • 1 MB RAM
  • 2 MB Flash

Interfaces

Industrial Wired Interfaces

All industrial wired interfaces are galvanically isolated to prevent ground-loops and increases overall system resilience.

Other Wired Interfaces

  • Debug-UART providing a Unix shell
  • USB-C for flashing the Yocto image and connecting via adb (Android Debug Bridge)

Wireless Interfaces

Miscellaneous

Further Information

In case you are interested in obtaining a Pika Spark board please send me an :email: via contact@pika-spark.io .

5 Likes
2

Really exciting stuff!

3 Likes
3

This looks really clean.

In terms of supplying power to the unit, just going by the block diagram, are the options usb C and PoE on both the 10base-t1s and 1000base-T?

1 Like
4

Thank you :bowing_man: .

Yes, you can supply power via any of (or any combination of)

  • USB-C
  • PoE (Power-over-Ethernet on the 1000BASE-T)
  • PoDL (Power-over-Data-Lines on the 10BASE-T1S)

however, only when powering over PoE or PoDL you have galvanic isolation.

USB-C is intended for development, all other interfaces for deployment.

1 Like