The RP2350-Powered Board Every Roboticist Needs

If you’ve spent any amount of time working with robots, then you’ll know that the development process is very complex and extremely slow. All of those sensors, motors, and interfaces aren’t going to wire and configure themselves. It takes a lot of time and debugging to get everything to play together nicely. So much so that even the idea of making a change can give a roboticist nightmares. This is unfortunate, because rapid experimentation is essential for the field to move forward.

A new device called link101, developed by robocore, addresses this problem. It is an open source multi-protocol bridge for ROS 2 robots. Using link101, all of a robot’s motors and sensors can be seen by a computer as standard Linux devices via a single USB-C connection. There are no drivers to install or write — link101 handles the details while you move fast and try not to break things.

Instead of juggling a pile of USB-to-UART adapters and hoping Linux assigns them the same device names after every reboot, developers can connect a single board that exposes each interface independently. CAN, RS485, UART, and I2C devices all appear as standard Linux interfaces with stable names, making it much easier to build robots that combine hardware from different vendors.

A typical mobile robot might use ODrive wheel motors, Dynamixel servos for an arm, Feetech actuators for a camera mount, a UART lidar, and an IMU for navigation. Normally, integrating that mix of hardware means dealing with several communication buses, different adapters, and a collection of vendor-specific setup procedures. With link101, those devices can all connect through the same board and communicate over a single USB-C cable, allowing developers to choose the best hardware for each task instead of being constrained by interface compatibility.

The hardware is built around the Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller and includes dedicated hardware for CAN-FD, RS485, half-duplex and full-duplex UART, plus I2C with Qwiic and STEMMA QT compatibility. An onboard LSM6DSOTR six-axis IMU, GPIO pins, ADC inputs, and NeoPixel status indicators further expand its capabilities, making the board useful as both a communication hub and a development platform.

Developers can also choose how deeply they want to integrate the board into their systems. In transparency mode, existing ROS 2 drivers, vendor utilities, and ros2_control configurations continue working without modification because link101 simply bridges the hardware to Linux. Standalone mode goes a step further by running application-specific firmware directly on the RP2350. Using zenoh-pico over USB CDC, time-critical control loops execute on the microcontroller instead of the host computer, reducing scheduling jitter and improving deterministic behavior for demanding robotics applications.

Hardware design files, firmware, protocol drivers, ROS 2 packages, and an SDK for adding new protocols are all being released, making it possible for developers to build custom carrier boards while contributing new protocol support back to the community. Sign up for notifications on Crowd Supply to be the first to know when link101 is released.