Can the Genisis 1.6 electronics be used on an Express

I see the Genesis v1.6 Electronics Box with v1.6 Farmduino is available for Pre-Order. Could this be used on an Express? I would like the Raspberry Pi upgrade as well as the additional indicators and buttons.

Here’s the deal @Davejavu:

We have customers that have upgraded all the way from v1.2 to the current v1.5. We’ve seen plenty of folks do this, but they were upgrading from one product line model to a newer model in the same product line. We have not seen anyone upgrade across product lines, but if you are willing to put in the effort, it might be possible with extra work and modification of components. That comes with the caveat that the product was only designed to be upgraded within the same product line. If you hit a roadblock, we might not be able to help you fix it. An Express => Genesis upgrade is not something we considered when designing the system.

Off the top of my head:

  • You will need to buy a USB adapter for the camera
  • You won’t be able to use encoders.

There are probably some other things I am forgetting, but our hunch is that it might be possible.

Can the Genisis hardware detect motor stalls?

@Davejavu You could select “EXPRESS” as your firmware for the device and it would detect stalls the same way your current Express bot detects stalls.

The one caveat I would add to that is that, since you are the only person I am aware of that is trying this, there may be some assumptions baked into FBOS that may need to be updated since it is an unusual use case.

Thanks @RickCarlino, I am a 30+ year bare metal embedded software engineer (with a degree in Electrical Engineering). I’m a big tinkerer, so this sort of thing can be interesting albeit frustrating. I totally understand that Farmbot is more of a tinkerers project, so I expect to make many mods to get it running smoothly. From what I can tell, the RPi zero seems very under-powered. So getting to a more capable SoC seems like a good first step. I read somewhere in the forum that the RPi is not upgradable in the Express, so perhaps the new hardware box would be a good first step. If I go down this route, I am more than willing to open source any work to make the transformation.

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