Topics

1

New Product Ideas / TinyDuino with a few connection pins added in the corners

« on: March 13, 2014, 08:14:49 PM »

Hey all,

I've been staring long and hard at my Tinyduino desperately wishing I could get just a few connections from it without adding a whole new shield and 5mm of thickness.  Given that most of the devices I can find now are square anyway, would it be possible to use the corners of the board to rout solder connections for a few pins?  It looks like there is probably space for 2 through holes in each corner just space wise (obviously routing will be harder than space), or even just use the actual screw holes for those of us not using screws.  But wouldn't it be great if we could just have a couple of analog and digital lines?  And maybe just use a solder jumper to select what is connected?  That would help the TinyDuinos to span the gap between themselves and the TinyLilly.  Having an object that can have a clip on shield but also a couple of optional pins in a pinch would be super super useful...

Thanks!

2

New Product Ideas / Rotary input knob for Tiny Shield LED's

« on: March 10, 2014, 08:16:30 PM »

Hi Everybody,

I can't say enough how awesome this whole platform is-- its tiny and there are lots of sensor and actuator options.  It strikes me though that there is a pretty big gap in the user input arena.  The tiny shield LED's are wonderful (a great layout for displaying some sort of 1D data) but it would be way way better with the option of some sort of rotational knob and maybe a button.  Either a potentiometer (SMT trim pot?) or encoder in the center would be just wonderful, wouldn't it?  Power adjustment with concurrent display of % power level, temperature adjustment with the current temperature display etc.  A lot of potentially cool applications.

Even better would be one of the ones that lets you press the knob to do a button input, or a couple of tiny smt buttons- one on each side would let you do a full fledged user interface with multiple menu items.  A knob could even be magnet-lock removable so it still fits in the middle of a stack but that would take a bit of engineering or perhaps easier a tutorial about how to use superglue to do it;)  I could do a tutorial on that if it helped.

OOh, I just found something almost exactly like I'm talking about actually:

http://www.karlssonrobotics.com/cart/rotary-encoder-led-ring-breakout-board-blue/



Anyway, Keep up the good work!
-Dave

3

New Product Ideas / Combined Full Inertial Sensing shield

« on: March 10, 2014, 07:43:05 PM »

Hi Everybody,

Given that the whole point of these super awesome circuits is to be very small, it seems like a pretty natural desire to have all the inertial sensing stuffed onto one shield instead of 3=12mm tall.  Bosch has several "9 axis" parts available integrating 3 axis accel, 3 axis gyroscopes, and 3 axis magnetometer into one single 3mm*5mm*1mm package.

https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/en/homepage/products_3/9_axis_sensors_5/9-axis_sensors

It will naturally be pricier than a 3 axis accel board, but in applications where space is a premium (Which is why we are all using these awesome boards!), I'd sure rather buy one board and be done with all the sensing forever   Certainly very useful for all the motion sensing applications out there as well as the micro quad-copter people.

They also have the combined sensor and sensor fusion chips that are only slightly bigger and output absolute orientation data  Given that this will be a premium board over the single accel board, that might be nice to just do that.  It would probably help to differentiate this option compared to buying the accel, gyros and magnetometer individually.

Thanks and keep up the awesome work!!!
-Dave

P.S. I'm a engineering PhD student who does micro robotics and inertial sensor designs if its helpful!