Developed by Kim Olsen from Denmark, the Heclo shield is designed to be used in combination with any Arduino-compatible Mega2560 board. The shield provides all the components needed for both the TCB and the Open Panzer Sound card on a single board. It also adds two additional onboard motor drivers capable of delivering up to 30 amps each. In other words, this design creates a complete tank control package with no need for external speed controls or sound cards (though those are still supported).
The board uses surface mount components on both the top and bottom of the board, so requires advanced assembly skills if you want to attempt to build your own.
Because the hardware is not entirely the same it requires its own special version of firmware, which can be downloaded in OP Config on the Firmware tab by selecting the "TCB - Heclo Shield" entry in the Hex file drop down. Or you can view the source code here in this repository. The Heclo firmware was forked from TCB firmware starting at v0.93.68, the first release of the Heclo firmware is v0.93.70.
- Discussion thread for the Heclo Shield.
- Schematics and hardware files for the Heclo Shield can be found on the Open Panzer Downloads page.
- For more information on the Open Panzer project generally, see the OpenPanzer Wiki.
For more information about working with Arduino code, see the README on the TCB repo.