TIGER is a platform for Engineering Students at Trinity University to use as a substrate/launch point for designs.
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TIGER has been the goal of several different senior design projects now. In Fall 2025, Dr. Nickels is going to "tear it down to the studs" and rebuild, with the goal of having a serviceable platform for further work. It should have six drive wheels, a passive rocker-bogie suspension, and at a minimum an interface to ROS2.
Code can be found at https://github.com/TUEngr/Rover-Motorhttps://github.com/TUEngr/Rover-Motor
A while ago, PCBWay reached out about sponsoring a new spin of the TIGER control board. The timing worked out well, because in July I had just finished a new revision.
The upgrades are mostly quality-of-life: pullup resistors for the PWM inputs for the BLDC motors, better motor plugs (thanks to the JPL Open Source Rover project for that idea), and a power gate that requires the firmware to be up and running before the motors get power, so they don't spin on reboot. Plus general cleanup.
So, thanks to PCBWay for sponsoring the boards. We uploaded Gerbers for the 2-layer board on July 22 and had boards on the bench in San Antonio on July 31 - nine days door to door, including fab and international shipping, which I consider a great turnaround. While I'm here: I do recommend 2-layer boards for early prototypes like this one, because every trace stays on an outer layer and mistakes can be fixed with a simple cut-and-jump bodge wire. I already found one error of my own that needs exactly that, before the boards even arrived.
Quality was excellent, and one detail worth calling out is that the boards matched PCBWay's online Gerber viewer exactly. Checking the rendered Gerbers is a required step when I teach board design and layout, and it's only worth anything if the viewer is truthful about what will show up; in this case it was.
PCBWay provided the boards at no cost in exchange for an honest account of the experience, and this is it. But when I consider the time saved against routing a board in-house — which is how we normally do it here — I may be sending more business their way, if I can get the students to build that extra week into
their schedules. :)
Pics coming as soon as I get the rest of the components in.
Over the summer, Ryan in the MakerSpace has been working on re-building the legs to be stiffer to torsion, which seems to be the primary failure mode of these legs - the lever of the wheel twisting against the body. We decided to use bicycle head-sets for the joints, which consist essentially of two sets of bearings and races, separated by some distance. You can see them in the image below.
The legs are made from 1x2 aluminum bar stock, and the head tubes/steer tubes from 34mm (ID) and 1 1/8" (28.5mm) ID aluminum pipes. Shoutout to Clayton, a Trinity student, for his excellent aluminum welding skills.
Dr. Nickels will be updating the rover in Fall 2025, after he spends some time building a couple open-sourced rover designs - first, TRIPPY - a sawppy varient, then JPLs Open Source Rover, to have a couple smaller hopefully robust platforms and to learn construction and programming techniques from them. Stay tuned!
The main focus this summer was on upgrading the electronics from a breakout to an RCB (routed circuit board).
Senior Design 2022-23
Summer Research 2022
Senior Design 2021-22
Summer Research Team 2021
Senior Design 2020-2021
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Now that the mechanics are set, it's time to re-work the electronics, using what we've learned from the 
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Martin Vincent Bloedorn
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