Roverling Mk II Is a Utilitarian and Affordable DIY Mobile Robotics Platform

So, you want to build a robot — where do you start? Reinventing the wheel isn’t a great idea until you have experience, which means you’ll want to look for an existing kit or design. But there are so many to choose from and it can be hard to know what to select. Because we’re fans of DIY builds and learning through hands-on experience, we think Mark Makies’s Roverling Mk II is an option worth looking at.

Mark built the original Roverling using mostly parts salvaged from an old 3D printer. That is a neat way to upcycle old components, but the Roverling wasn’t very practical and it would have been difficult for other to reproduce. The Roverling Mk II can be built using 3D-printed parts and off-the-shelf hardware, and Mark designed it to explore his large bush property in Australia.

The Roverling Mk II isn’t polished by any means. In fact, it is pretty rough: just a frame and some wheels, with a bunch of components bolted on. But that’s part of the charm, because this is a platform to experiment with and build upon. And that isn’t to say that it isn’t well equipped. As outfitted according to Mark’s blog post, it contains quite a lot of great hardware:

A GNSS receiver, an IMU, a 2.4GHz six-channel RC receiver, two drive motors (each with quadrature encoders and current sensors), a sonar rangefinder, a LoRa module (communicates with LoRa base station), and a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B paired with three Waveshare RP2040-Zero development boards to control it all.

The frame is a 3D-printed affair, designed in FreeCAD for utility over beauty with a bunch of mounting holes for the hardware and wheels. Those wheels have a very rudimentary spring suspension system and big knobby tires. Combined with the substantial “lift,” this is great for driving over rough terrain. And it has a servo-actuated steering rack (as opposed to differential steering), which is more reliable on loose surfaces.

Roverling Mk II’s software and firmware are a bit difficult to understand, as there are a lot of different components talking to each other. Take a look at Mark’s block diagram to get a sense of that:

But all of the code is available and anyone building a Roverling Mk II can pick and choose what they want to suit their application. Mark even programmed a pretty nifty GUI with all kinds of functionality, like mapping, camera views, compass headings, pitch and roll gauges, positional coordinate recording, and more.