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Welcome to the Elcano Project Wiki

As the title says, WELCOME TO THE ELCANO PROJECT! Over the past few years, many different teams have been working hard to create Cheap and Modular autonomy at the University of Washington Bothell. We have developed two prototype recumbent tricycles and also worked on an ELF tricycle. Using affordable microcontrollers such as the Arduino Due and Jetson Nano, CAN bus communication, and Pixhawk, we are working towards creating Autonomy for anyone to build anywhere, with electronics and software under $2000 and fully open-source. But we don't plan to stop there, no. That is just the first step toward our ultimate goal: making our systems applicable to any desired ground vehicle, such as cars. Autonomy is nothing new; in fact, it has been around for over 40 years. The difference is that now we can make it available for anyone who desires to further their knowledge or simply find a safer way to work.

Elcano Project Main Website: [1]

Visit our GitHub repositories: [2].

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Overview

The basic concept of how the Elcano Project vehicle works.

System Architecture

How processors connect to sensors, each other, actuators, and other hardware. Includes processor-to-processor communication protocol.

Communication (CAN Bus)

How processors exchange data on the vehicle and a description of data packet contents.

Power System

How different modules connect to the batteries or power subsystem hardware.

Drive-By-Wire

How the version 5 Drive-By-Wire system (aka Low-Level) uses inputs to control actuators to steer, move, and stop the vehicle.

Navigation Computer

How the system uses GNSS to formulate movement instructions sent to Drive-by-Wire.

RemoteControl

A radio communication link allows human control. There are also onboard controls. The goal is to use neither and have control come from the Nav computer.

Simulator

Instead of the Drive-by-Wire board and navigation computer controlling the real trike, another Arduino routes their I/O to a virtual vehicle.

SensorsPage

SteeringSensor

The front wheel angle detector. Sensors are mounted on the left steering column and/or right steering column. Sensors in use as of 2026 are analog. There are two varieties. Each is sensitive to 1/3 of a degree. The original is good for 360 degrees. Thus there are 1080 possible values. When these are spread over 3.3V, each step is 3 mV. Since the long wire from the sensor to the Arduino acts as an antenna, noise can be significant. There are two methods to reduce noise.

1) The present analog sensor is only good for 60 degrees, which is more than the +/- 25 degree maximum turn. This makes the minimum step 18 mV.

2) The ground signal on the sensor is sent back on either L_RTN (left steering column) or R_RTN (right steering column). Both the wires carrying the signal and the return wire are expected to pick up the same noise. A chip on the DBW board subtracts the two to get a value closer to the original.

Noise could be eliminated by using a digital signal. A future sensor might use SPI. Jumpers can be installed to replace the sensor signals with MOSI, SCK and CS. Another digital solution is to purchase a sensor that puts its information on the CAN bus.

Speedometer

There are two magnetic pickups on the wheel. One goes to a standard bicycle cyclometer which shows speed and distance. The other goes to DBW where the software interprets the once per revolution click. Speed resolution is limited by the wheel circumference and cannot detect very low speeds.

More accurate speed information could be obtained from the Hall sensor on the e-bike controller, but this has never been done.

GPS

The Pixhawk handles GPS. It includes inertial sensors and a Kalman filter and thus improves on raw GPS. Various sensors can be purchased. Some use Global Network Satellite Systems (GNSS) from other countries to improve on the US Global Positioning System.

Current Board Diagrams

Images of Elcano Project's printed circuit boards for reference. PCB source files and schematics are maintained and stored at [3].

Software development procedures

Software repositories

What's in each of our GitHub repositories.

Luke Kustra's repo: https://github.com/luke-kustra/JetHawk-LKustra.git

Luke's contribution was experimenting with the LiDAR sensor. He was able to get the LiDAR to deactivate and display information about its surroundings, including the number of objects and their distance from the LiDAR sensor. Of course, the sensor should never deactivate when in real use; however, this deactivation is proof that the LiDAR is ready to be utilized in a larger system such as a vehicle.

Henry Haight's repo: https://github.com/Autonomous-ATV-Capstone-Team-Sequence/-LIDAR

Arduino software

Getting started; references; development tools. Dealing with libraries and different parameters for each vehicle.

Using Git and GitHub

Practices for maintaining code and source files on Elcano Project's GitHub repositories.

Archived material

Files

These are media files (pictures, videos, etc.) that are part of the project but are not maintained under version control.