I’ve been tinkering with an idea for a general-purpose base/carrier board for the Adafruit Itsy Bitsy M4.
The idea is to have an Arduino-like system that allows stacked boards to be addressed and also allows for small amounts of IO circuitry to be connected to the edges of the main PCB.
I don’t show the “walls” in the vid because they are not designed yet for this version, but here is a photo of a previous version that is very similar.
I just sent V2 of the new design off to PCBway, I will load a couple of them and see how they work, based on that I’ll decide if I want to continue with the project.
Anyway I thought you guys might find it a little bit different to other offerings currently available. It will be open source but apart from a networked monitoring system for my solar system it’s just a bit of fun for me that helps me keep my design hand in.
Thanks for sharing this it looks like a well thought out piece of design work, I wasn’t familiar with the Quub concept so thanks for the summary at the end.
Oh, and the Grey Nomad Designs logo is a very nice touch!
@Trent5487676 It’s something I’ve been toying with for a few years, since I finally got sick of the Arduino limitations, not that anybody else cares about them It’s had many incarnations but I might finally get this one up and running.
Normally I do the CPU design as well, but I’m a bit over that and bootstrapping a new CPU design from scratch can be a pain, so I decided to go with the Itsy Bitsy.
@Liam That design was a system of DIN-rail-mounted monitor and control boards I designed for a Brazilian company. Every board had it’s own CPU and they communicated via an I2C backplane.
That looks great! The cable management is impressively clean, something we’re unfortunately not too familiar with for photos that are generally posted on the forum
I’m curious what the control board was used for, obviously it was for some industrial application similarly to how PLC were often mostly used back in the day (I’m assuming it’d be running at around the 12V or 24V mark?). Also if you’d like to shoot through the photo of your V2 once it comes back from PCBway (shipping from China has been taking quite a while to get here to Australia recently as we’ve found with some of our orders too) it’d be great to have a look at!
Enjoy your weekend, and please let us know if you have any questions.
@Bryce Yeah that’s a neat job. Not mine, despite hinting they needed me in Brazil to help I never got there I just designed the hardware and liased with PCBcart, the fab house in China. I could have written the firmware as well but they had their own engineers for that.
Here are two of their promo documents that give some idea as to what they are for
As you can probably determine from that PDF document they are into water management and yes the modules are essentially PLCs and it’s a 24v system. All IO could read up to 50v, digital was isolated, 4-20mA IO, Ethernet, RF and GSM connectivity, yada yada. Every one was an Arduino-compatible board, the slaves all had ATmega328 CPUs and the master an ATmega256. All talking via an I2C bus running along the DIN rail.
After that I designed a stand-alone data logger for them.
I haven’t ordered any parts yet so can’t really populated anything except the Adafruit module and a switch I had in stock.
I’m working on a couple of prototyping boards now so I can at least get some useful hardware up and running. The freight from PCBway can be more than the boards if you only do one design so I will get 3-4 ready and do them all at once.
The first proto board is designed to play with hardware plugged into the side of the base PCB.
Glad your mail finally arrived! The model doesn’t look so nice but the actual white boards in the photos look slick. So glad the days of only green PCBs are over.
I’m an R&D type, I like designing but not manufacturing, so I hate sourcing components, as is witnessed by the fact that I don’t have any for the CPU board So I tend to put it off. In the case of the CPU board however there is nothing unusual that should be hard to get so I’m not worried, but these terminals are from a company I’ve never heard of so it makes sense to order a few up front I think.
Keystone make something similar that’s available in all the usual places so I wouldn’t be worried about that, but it’s only good for 30A.
In general I search on Octopart, if a component is in stock at 4-5 suppliers I’m happy to use it, if not I try to use something else.
Thanks for the pointer on Octopart! My designs are super simple for now, but sourcing has always seemed daunting to me, there’s a million options for each part in my design on Digikey, so which to pick? Seems like picking an available one should be my priority in the future.
When I finally get a PCB design that works and solves a problem, I’ll stick it here for sure.
-James
It’s had many incarnations but I might finally get this one up and running.
