Dear SSL Community,

I hereby submit a completely new generation of TIGERs robots for the Open-Source Award. Don't be afraid, they have no wheels, they are not playing on the field, and still they are pretty awesome!

In the repositories listed below you can find all the files for a 2-axis (pan, tilt) camera gimbal system. It is powered by a single PoE connection and understands the SSL Tracking Protocol. Just put it next to the field, punch in its location and it will happily track the ball all-day long. So that your camera always gets the perfect shot at the action.

It is made of a cheap Raspberry Pi Zero, a custom driver board with STM32G4 microcontroller (featuring field-oriented control), some off-the-shelf components (PoE hat, display, motors) and a few 3D printed parts. The firmware even has jerk-limited trajectories to ensure maximum smoothness when following the ball.

There are two variants available. One small one for an action cam and a bigger one to mount our various league streaming cameras. The small variant has already been extensively tested and an earlier version of that was successfully used at the Schubert Invitational Tournament in spring in Germany.

You can find all the hardware (mechanics, electronics) here: https://github.com/TIGERs-Mannheim/gimbal-hardware Software running on the Pi is here: https://github.com/TIGERs-Mannheim/gimbal-rpi And the firmware for the microcontroller here: https://github.com/TIGERs-Mannheim/gimbal-mcu-firmware

As an additional bonus, we also open-sourced our buildroot configurations to build custom Linux images here: https://github.com/TIGERs-Mannheim/tigers-buildroot

The OS running on the gimbal is also made by buildroot and the gimbal-rpi repository also contains instructions on cross-compiling to ease remote development and debugging. The buildroot setup may be of particular interest to other teams using a Raspberry Pi in their infrastructure. It features an A/B style update system (also remotely) and a read-only root file system with overlay for user changes. So you can still make changes, but it doesn't break if you just power it off as well.

Best regards, Andre Ryll TIGERs Mannheim