About the Project

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Category: Articles

Published on Sunday, 28 April 2013 18:18

Written by Örs Hunor Detre

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This project was established in 2004 and aims at building up a development system for mechatronics applications based on the usage of small 8- or 16-bit microcontrollers in combination with appropriate peripheral components. As every developer seems to run through the same development stages over and over again, the idea was to build a pool of modular components. These would easily be pluggable together and thus could save the developer a lot of time, not having to go through all of this: choosing and purchasing a controller, crystal, capacitors, power supply,... designing the circuit, layouting the board, manufacturing the PCB, soldering the parts, testing the circuitry, designing the firmware/software, testing the application... and most likely having to go back to one of the early stages for redesign.

By providing well-tested modules (consisting of bits of hardware and firmware), any person interested in electronics could easily develop his own system and let his own dream come true.

We recommend the contents of this page

• for hobbyists, who like to learn about microcontrollers and their usage
• for students, to help them speed up their projects
• for developers, to enable their focus on the system rather than on the basics

We want to build a community

By the realization of this project, an old dream came true and is still unfolding. We want to create and provide a platform that aims at making the development process of even complex mechatronics systems as easy, fast and fun as possible. Even people with low C or Assembler programming skills can find a way into system development. People with more sophisticated development skills can support and are encouraged to contribute to the development of new modules covering further communication, sensor or actuator principles.

Modularity

Ease and speed of development is achieved and supported by a modular system build-up. In today's personal computer systems expansion cards with standard interfaces are used to realize modularity. The heart of the system is a motherboard (it's main component is a microcontroller), which defines the overall computation power, execution speed and expandability. In the same way, our motherboards define the system capabilities and can be built up and expanded by a selection from a pool of more than 100 different extension modules. Modularity of any system component (motherboard or module) is achieved by the realization of:

• universal programmer interfaces, regardless of the controller family used (AVR, PIC, Parallax, Xillix)
• universal power connectors
• universal data interface pinning

Flexibility

As you see on the animation below, by changing the configuration on the software side of the application, it is easily possible to completely change any module and module position on the motherboard. So, experimenting and prototyping of applications becomes like constructing with LEGO.

Simplicity

On every motherboard you will find only the most neccessary electronic parts. This was done in order to minimize the potential for design bugs while leaving as many free in/out pins as possible for module expansion. On the firmware side, the programming is done as straight forward and simple as possible. Just to provide the basic functions and maximize the learning effect.