An open platform, published rather than sold
Frindo started as a community robotics project: mechanical drawings, schematics, tutorials and example code, all free to download and build from.
An open robotics platform
The open robot you print yourself.
A chassis you print at home, at school or at university, an exact parts list, and ROS 2 or Python driving it from day one. Frindo began in 2009 as an open robotics platform: published drawings, free to download, build it yourself. Same idea now, with the part that was always its weak point solved by Motion Core MC1, a motor controller for mobile robots — it does the closed-loop control and the odometry that open platforms usually leave to you.
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What's in the project
Everything needed to get a robot moving, and nothing you have to guess at.
- chassis
- Printable parts, no machining and no special tools. Print it at home, at school or in a university makerspace.
- parts list
- Exact motors, wheels and fasteners, with links — not "a motor of about this size". The parts list is the part most open robots get wrong.
- electronics
- A Motion Core MC1 motor controller and a Raspberry Pi. Closed-loop control and encoder odometry, rather than guessing where the robot went.
- software
- ROS 2 or Python. Velocity commands in, odometry and transforms out, over ORCP — an open, documented serial protocol with ROS 2 and Python libraries, and a simulator.
- licence
- The robot's design files will be released under an open licence: yours to modify, print and sell. Motion Core MC1 is a commercial product. Motion Core and the Frindo name are not part of that release.
Frindo's history
Started in 2009. Picked back up with better hardware.
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2009
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2013
The robot people actually built
Two 160 mm laser-cut acrylic chassis plates, a pair of Pololu micro-motors, and an Arduino RobotShield carrying a dual motor driver — open-licensed and donated to the project. Kits were sold in the UK through RobotBits, and the robot ran from either an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi.
It was covered by Elektor, CNX Software and LinuxGizmos.
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2026
Printable at home, at school or wherever the printer is
In 2013 an acrylic chassis meant finding a laser cutter, and that barrier kept the project smaller than it should have been. 3D printers are ordinary now: in schools, in university makerspaces, in spare rooms. So the design has been redrawn to print on a standard desktop machine. If you have a printer, you can have the chassis tomorrow.
The second change is underneath. The motor driver is no longer a hobby shield: Motion Core MC1 does closed-loop control, current limiting and encoder odometry on its own, and ROS 2 is the default way to drive it rather than a project for later.