ROS to CAN Bridge

During my summer 2025 internship at Reframe Systems I primarily worked on unlocking BLDC, brushless direct current, motors and force-torque control for an end-of-arm-tool design. Reframe Systems aims to alleviate the climate and housing crises by streamlining and automating the modular housing construction process to create quality sustainable housing more affordably and faster. My project involved integrating motors for a July demo. This gave me the opportunity to experience working on a critical project. I developed my communication and project management skills to coordinate with others on my team and hit the dead line. We ultimately had a successful demo. 

On the technical side, I brought up 5 BLDC, motors controlled over CAN. I learned a lot about microROS and firmware development, reinforced my ROS2 knowledge, and used C, C++, and PlatformIO, for the existing ROS2 stack to control the motors with CAN. I designed the control / ROS2 architecture, implemented axis calibration, loaded configuration values from a microSD card, and wrote the firmware to be modular for future end-of-arm-tool designs. Along the way, I learned about CAN, and improved my understanding of memory management and multithreading. Before the summer I had no CAN or involved firmware experience. It was awesome working in a less familiar domain, reinforcing my prior knowledge, and completing a project with tangible impact. 

A big thanks to my mentors Joseph Schornak, Perry Franklin, and Felipe Polido.