Building an Autonomous Vehicle: The Batmobile

Contributors: Nate

Control Electronics - Sensors

The Sensor Combinator is a SAMD21 Mini that monitors a GPS receiver and an I²C compass. We decided to use a SAMD21 because it can be configured to have multiple hardware serial and I²C ports. This is needed if you want to isolate I²C devices from the main bus. We wanted the Brain to ask for the heading and get the heading; the Sensor Combinator took care of the low-level I²C function of the compass and heading calculations. Similarly, the Combinator listened to the serial stream from the u-blox based GPS module and parsed out all the needed Latitude/Longitude/SIV information.

The code for the Sensor Combinator can be found here.