PK70 Blade board...

[pbreed]

The PK70 has been around about 18 months.
We have been selling

Digital balde board (32 digital I/O)
Prototype board (Bard holes)
Multiblade board (16 digital and 8 a/d)
Quad RS-232 board.
Quad RS-485 board.


In work (boards ordered) we have
A Xilinx board with a XC3S500E 500K gate FPGA on it.
A GPS board with a GPS receiver to be an NTP server or a GPS dta logger.

We will most likely do (95% sure) a GSM/GPS blade module for remote data stuff.


As CTO of NetBurner I'm also a client
In my personal stash of boards built for other things but not (yet) marketed for Netburner I have
A Double Blade It has the 62 pin HD conector and 16 channels of A/D 24 channels of Digital I/O through a large CPLD and 4 isolated solid state opto relays.
A board that drives 8 RC servos and has 16 A/D inputs and 4 relay drivers.
A board with 10 channels of RC servo receiver(To receive commands from a normal RC receiver) and 16 channels of RC servo drive.

Does anyone have any specific PK70 blades they would like to see?
Does anyone have a desire for me to turn my personal project blades into Netburner products?

Would there be much intrest in "robot" specific netburner boards?
I've used custom boards with Netburner modules to run both my
RC helicopter :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2vEfghqWts
and my Rocket : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dacpVhUnEXw
Any interest in making this sort of electronics hardware a Netburner product?

Paul

[bbracken]

Paul,

Although maybe not Blade specific, there seems to be a demand for USB.

bb

[Ridgeglider]

Paul: I have lots of interest in those kind of gps, gsm/gps, servo, a/d, opto, kinds of circuits. Unfortunately we are pretty vested in the 5234, not the PK70. In addition, I suspect that even if I had your boards, we'd need to build our own custom boards anyhow to accomodate specific requirements: I/O, mech form factor, etc...

I'd therefore be hard-pressed to encourage you to sell those boards because although I might buy a few, the volumes would be low and ultimately for prototype purposes only -- IE probably NOT worth your while.

HOWEVER: I would be very interested in your designs and code as reference designs (on the wiki?) that I think would ultimately drive more volume on your existing modules. Even though, to date we've spun boards that have gps, servo, a/d functions and anticipate doing a gsm/gps combo, comparison to a reference design would be very worthwhile to us, and I'm sure to others. We are not wedded to any particular board and are always looking for improvements.

A second alternative to simply publishing the reference designs would be to repackage essentially the same circuits in a form factor that allowed sets of those boards to stack onto the existing module J1/J2 headers. That way they could be used with any NB module (not just PK70). They could also be used in multiples, in a series of boards in a stack: some NB boards, and some custom to handle customer-specific IO. This is the PC104 approach and I think it would be quite compelling. If you went that route, I'd look for some standard Hammond-type card-cage type enclosure that you could use to set the board dimensions. Typically then you can buy the extrusion in lengths that stack 3, 4, 5, 7 boards etc.

While I'm at it, one of the reasons the PC104 products sell is that you can assemble a complicated pre-tested set of hardware quickly, with the requirement of maybe doing one small often simple board to handle the unique job-specific IO. You can't do that with the NB family, since there are no building blocks (AD, servo, GPS, relay, etc) If you want that stuff, you have to bring it ALL up!

I'd be an advocate of the stack approach!

[seulater]

Though we have no use for many of the things you mentioned. I would like to see NB have the ability to drive some color LCD panels. Color touch screens are now so cheap, a typical 3.5" screen is only $35 bucks. It would be nice to have the NB be able to provide the timing that these screens need.