New Smart Board Development

[ohararp]

Hey all,

I have been thinking about making some custom modules for my iobridge and I thought I would post some of them here.  I am getting ready to do some design work over the holidays and knocked out this design real quick.  

I am going to be working on a humidity sensor, solid state relay board (120/240VAC), xbee board, etc.  If you have any thoughts on something you might like to see be sure to let me know!

[zero*gx]

i would like to see an adapter that plugs into an each channel and transmit data wirelessly. there would be a reciever board that had all the ports from the iobridge on it.

[ohararp]

@ZEROGX

Ask and you shall receive!  I have attached a quick picture of an xbee breakout board and analog humidity sensor as well.

I plan on having some pcbs fabbed over Thanksgiving and hope have some real hardware pics here shortly.

[zero*gx]

that was FAST! thanks...

Im assuming that when fabbed it will be designed as a multilevel pcb?

[zero*gx]

btw: what software are you using for these mockups?

[ohararp]

Most of the boards I have designed are 2 layer boards and these will be the same.  I use  Proteus from www.labcenter.co.uk .  It's a great product and works very well.  It's not free but is very reasonable.  It also has the ability to simulate both code and hardware in a spice environment.  Very handy for development.

[ohararp]

New Board - 4 amp 120VAC Triac board with very handly screw terminal design!  Schematic is included this time as well.

[uknative]

I really like the idea of the X-bee board, what price range are you looking at charging for these?
Would it have to plug into the serial board?

[ohararp]

As it stands right now the XBEE board can only plug into the IO-204 module itself.  I orginally only needed to transmit data from the The pinouts for the serial board do not match the convention used on the main module itself and  will therefore require a second iteration of the XBEE interface board for direct plugin.  However, you could simply create a cable to match the pinout of the device you were plugging in.

[ohararp]

# of the dev modules I am working on arrived today.  I'll post more tomorrow after I get them put together!

Quick Pic - Gotta run. 

[uknative]

Okay, I understand now how the xbee needs only to plug into the iobridge.
The boards look good. Let us know how they go.

[zero*gx]

i assume for the receiver end of this, i would have the same board but with the receiver version of the xbee? i have never worked with an xbee, only read about them.

i assume it would be pair the two xbees, then connect the transmitter / receiver respectively in my circuit?

[ohararp]

@zerogx - you would need some sort of xbee receiver board.  It could be any of the many that are out there now or simply another board as I have here.

Pictured below is the XBEE module with an XBEE PRO and a HIH-5031 Humidity Sensor.  I have a couple of things to fix.  Mainly that size of the XBEE board was carried over to the other boards and that you can't use multiple boards side by side. In this picture I have to use ports 2 & 4.  New designs will be smaller.

The new triac board with screw terminals will be arriving on Thursday.

[zero*gx]

so the xbees would just work as a "virtual iobridge extension cable" then?

[ohararp]

Yes.  As pictured it would be a one way transmit IOBRIDGE->XBEE->XBEE.

USing the Serial Smart board you could have 2 way comms.