The Arduino community spawns some interesting derivatives. One such device is the humble JeeNode from JeeLabs. JeeLabs is the company founded by seemingly tireless innovator Jean-Claude Wippler.
http://jeelabs.org/intro/
The JeeNode is a long thin pcb with an ATmega328 down the middle and a Hope RF RF12 transceiver at one end. It is loosely inspired by the RBBB (really bare bones board). The originals were made entirely from conventional components for easy DIY assembly.
I have known about these little ATmega328 and wireless tranceiver boards for some time now. However, I hadn't realised how much stuff this guy had done in the last 2 years.
His main innovation was to fit the low cost transceiver (£5) to every board - so wireless comms is central to the design. Secondly he arranges the I/O in four identical "ports" which carry one analogue I/O, one digital I/O, common interrupt, power and ground. As all ports are identical, any of his peripherals can plug into any port. To me, this seems a really neat way of arranging hardware, making it modular and expandable.
Just browsing through his hardware blog, he writes about something new almost every day, producing dozens of innovative little devices. I presume he has a software blog too !
http://jeelabs.org/category/
Lots of good stuff, well thought out and implemented - and almost all of it compatible with Arduino.
Whilst for compactness, he uses the 6 pin 2.54mm SIL header on his boards, he also expands these out to a 6 pin RJ11 connector, so that he can connect things up easily with very low cost telephone extension cables - about £1 for a 5m double ended cable.
Mindstorms
I was recently reminded of this connection method when I saw the Lego Mindstorms kit at an exhibition in London earlier this week. Mindstorms now consits of a vast number of sensors and motor devices, all of which are easy plug-compatible with the NXT controller. The NXT "brick" controller is quite a sophisticated device with an ARM 7 as the main processor and an ATmega as the I/O controller. It has 4 identicalI/O ports A-D and 3 motor ports which provide PWM power control of motors and tacho position and speed feedback. Wow! hasn't Lego grown up in the last few years - the height of sophistication in my early days was an electric Lego trainset.
So, the JeeNode identical port design is a great way to get a standard interface to hardware devices, and the wireless comms is a well considered addition. The RF12 module can run at any of the sub-1GHz standard ISM bands, and has a range and data bandwidth ideally suited to this application.
JeeMax?
So what if you built one of these around an Arduino Mega? (ATmega1280 or 2560) 16 identical ports with some I/O left over. As RJ11 sockets are only about 13mm wide, with 8 down each side, the board need only be about the size of an existing Mega. (108 x 54mm).
With each connector carrying AIO, DIO, power, ground, INT and unregulated power (eg 12V) a whole variety of different sensors or devices could be plugged in. Devices could be simple - such as a thermistor or PT100, or smart - such as microcontrollers or memory devices. Devices could be fitted with a very low cost 8 pin ATtiny, which gives them a unique identity, and allows the hub to identify their function - a bit like USB ennumeration, but simpler.
Using a larger pin-count micro on the device, would allow multiple channel sensors to be plugged into a single port - for example Trystan Lea's 12 channel pulse counter, or an 8 channel temperature sensor, or a 4 channel relay board. This would easily allow you to expand up to a large amount of I/O on a system.
Once the hub device has identified what devices are plugged in, it should be a much simpler task to build up a custom application around those devices.
Of course the JeeNode design brings wireless communications for remote nodes, but you still have to get power to these nodes. Wireless can struggle in older buidings with very thick walls or a lot of internal metalwork. Sometimes wired systems have advantages too.
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