CFW-002 The I-CUB 10-CAN motors, sensors, eyes and ears interface board CFW-002 The I-CUB 10-CAN motors, sensors, eyes and ears interface board Technical characteristics CAN interface10X ESD-protected CAN ports Firewire interface 2X 400mbps IEEE-1394 compliant ports Audio PA maximum power 920 mWatt over 8 ohm Audio LNA SNR 74dB Audio PGA regulation 7-step software controlled Onboard RAM for CAN packets FIFOs 128Kbits Onboard MCU 2X Infineon XC2287/XC2287M, up to 80 Mhz clock OS support Linux 2.6.X custom device driver PC side connectionStandard PC Mhz PCI connector Audio analog stages The CFW002 board is a PC-104 standard expansion card that is fitted inside the I-CUB head, directly connected to the robot PC-104 main board. It is the interface gateway for nearly all other boards on the robot; it enables high-bandwidth, low-latency, data streams to flow toward and from the PC-104 board. Motor boards, eye cameras, strain and tactile sensors and even audio lines spread over the whole the robot are managed by this board Overview For this purpose the CFW002 provides up to 10 CAN lines, providing a totally 10Mbps communication capability over a standard industrial high-reliability bus A reliable communication bus was needed in order to provide proper connection with the PC-104 main board for all the I-CUB boards. As the I-CUB have more than 30 electronic slave cards, quite a huge bandwidth was also required. Interface for motor boards and sensors In order to achieve its target the CFW002 is equipped with two automotive-grade Infineon XC2200 series MCUs. The two MCUs are connected to a local high speed bus through some Xilinx CPLDs. A 128Kbytes local RAM is also connected to the local bus. A PCI to local bus bridge is implemented on a PLX ASIC. The two MCUs can rely on two DMA engines in order to transfer data from and to the local RAM over the PCI bus. The CFW002 is BUS-master capable, making it possible to move great amounts of data through the PCI bus with a very little overhead for the PC- 104 main CPU. The I-CUB PC-104 board provides audio inputs and outputs, however an analog frontend circuits was needed in order to be able to drive a little low-impedance speaker and to be able to amplify the microphones’ signals. A two-channels two-stages amplifier make it possible to connect two capacitive microphone to the PC-104 audio in. After the first LNA stage, a PGA let the user choose the desired gain factor directly from the PC-104 operative system. An highly miniaturized class D power amplifier can feed the external speaker with very high efficiency thanks to the ΣΔ modulation driving technique. A custom Linux PCI device driver has been written in order to enable the I-CUB user software to access the CFW002. Eye cameras interface Two high-resolution IEEE-1394 (Firewire) cameras are installed into the I-CUB eye bulbs. The CFW002 is equipped with a Texas Instrument PCI-Firewire controller, and id does provide two firewire ports. Up to 400mbps bandwidth for each port is available in order to acquire full-frame- rate, full-resolution images. RBCS-EDL