Main Page
Contents
- 1 Welcome to the Elcano Project Wiki
- 2 Archived material
Welcome to the Elcano Project Wiki
As the title says, WELCOME TO THE ELCANO PROJECT! Over the past few years, many different teams have been working hard to create Cheap and Modular autonomy at the University of Washington Bothell. We are currently working on our first two prototypes which are now in the form of tricycles. With the use of affordable microcontrollers, such as the Arduino Due Jetson Nano and Pixhawk, we are working towards creating Autonomy for anyone to rebuild anywhere, and that under $2000 and fully open-source. But we don't plan to stop there, no. That is just the first step in reaching our ultimate goal, which is making our systems applicable to any desired ground vehicles, such as cars and other vehicles. Autonomy is nothing new, in fact, it has been around for over 40 years, the difference is that now we have the ability to make it available for anyone who desires to further their knowledge or simply finding a safer way to work.
Visit our github repositories here.
To edit articles or upload files, please create an account and request editing rights from a member of the "bureaucrat" group.
For editing, help visit https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Editing_pages or https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting.
Overview
The basic concept of how the Elcano Project vehicle works.
System Architecture
How processors connect to sensors, each other, actuators, and other hardware. Includes processor-to-processor communication protocol.
Communication (CAN Bus)
How processors exchange data on the vehicle and a description of data packet contents.
Power System
How different modules connect to the batteries or power subsystem hardware.
Drive-By-Wire
How the version 5 Drive-By-Wire system (aka Low-Level) uses inputs to control actuators to steer, move, and stop the vehicle.
How the system uses GNSS to formulate movement instructions sent to Drive-by-Wire.
RemoteControl
Human control of trike movements through Low Level using hardware connected to Low Level by a radio communication link (drive-by radio). Includes onboard controls (drive by wire).
Simulator
Instead of the Drive-by-Wire board and navigation computer controlling the real trike, another Arduino routes their I/O to a virtual vehicle.
SensorsPage
SteeringSensor
The front wheel angle detector. Sensors are mounted on the left steering column and/or right steering column. Sensors in use as of 2026 are analog. There are two varieties. Each is sensitive to 1/3 of a degree. The original is good for 360 degrees. Thus there are 1080 possible values. When these are spread over 3.3V, each step is 3 mV. Since the long wire from the sensor to the Arduino acts as an antenna, noise can be significant. There are two methods to reduce noise.
1) The present analog sensor is only good for 60 degrees, which is more than the +/- 25 degree maximum turn. This makes the minimum step 18 mV.
2) The ground signal on the sensor is sent back on either L_RTN (left steering column) or R_RTN (right steering column). Both the wires carrying the signal and the return wire are expected to pick up the same noise. A chip on the DBW board subtracts the two to get a value closer to the original.
Noise could be eliminated by using a digital signal. A future sensor might use SPI. Jumpers can be installed to replace the sensor signals with MOSI, SCK and CS. Another digital solution is to purchase a sensor that puts its information on the CAN bus.
Camera
How the camera and vision subsystem connected to High-Level works.
ActuatorPage
Current Board Diagrams
Images of Elcano Project's printed circuit boards for reference. PCB source files and schematics are maintained and stored at [1].
Software development procedures
Software repositories
What's in each of our GitHub repositories.
Luke Kustra's repo: https://github.com/luke-kustra/JetHawk-LKustra.git
Luke's contribution was experimenting with the LiDAR sensor. He was able to get the LiDAR to deactivate and display information about its surroundings, including the number of objects and their distance from the LiDAR sensor. Of course, the sensor should never deactivate when in real use; however, this deactivation is proof that the LiDAR is ready to be utilized in a larger system such as a vehicle.
Henry Haight's repo: https://github.com/Autonomous-ATV-Capstone-Team-Sequence/-LIDAR
Arduino software
Getting started; references; development tools. Dealing with libraries and different parameters for each vehicle.
Using Git and GitHub
Practices for maintaining code and source files on Elcano Project's GitHub repositories.
Files
These are media files (pictures, videos, etc.) that are part of the project but are not maintained under version control.
