When the Raspberry Pi people introduced their RP2040 microcontroller, it seemed that it could be a special product for regions where Pi was traditionally strong. But during the global shortage of semiconductors, it has been left almost alone among microcontrollers due to its abundant fab capacity to keep supplies flowing. It, and those programmable state machines as well as its very vanilla set of ARM peripherals looked like it had found a home in many places that it would not have seen otherwise. Take the dual RP2040 motor controller from [Twisted Fields] As an example, was STM32 more likely to play in previous years?
It is produced as part of the Acorn Precision Farming Robot platform, and is a fully open-source two-channel controller on a board the size of a credit card. The schematic seems fairly common at a cursory glance at the PDF, but we know from experience that motor controllers have never been as deceptively easy to get right as their circuit would lead an unsuspecting engineer to believe. Heat dissipation, current, and transient handling all play a role in a successful design and we hope it will evolve to solve any problems it may still have.
If you would like to remind yourself about the Acorn Farming Robot, take a look at the previous coverage of our project.
Thanks [Mark] For the tip