Project Arcturus

Project Arcturus is my full-size micromouse build, a small autonomous robot that has to map a 16x16 maze and solve it on its own, no remote control, no human input. It's built around an STM32H743, dual AS5047D magnetic encoders on custom daughterboards, DRV8874 motor drivers, and a BMI323 IMU, sourced and swapped part by part as things went out of stock or just didn't make sense on the BOM.

There are actually two versions running in parallel. Arcturus A is the buildable, cost-conscious version, Pololu motors, a 2-layer PCB, kept sane on price. Arcturus C has no budget ceiling: 4WD Faulhaber coreless motors, a downforce fan, and a BOM built to beat the top five competitive micromice in the world. One is meant to work. The other is meant to win.

The firmware is a flood-fill maze solver written in C, structured with a hardware abstraction layer so the same logic that's running in simulation now ports straight to the STM32 later. The board is designed in KiCad. Neither build is done, but both are moving.