Coming from a Galaxy far far away

Regarding heavier-duty interfaces…

Gadgeteer devices were great for prototyping, but the transition to production required that you manage your own fieldable cases and interconnects and such. And if you wanted to scale up (make more of them) then you had to scale up that enclosure construction too.

Sagitta devices will be available (and available first) as prototyping boards of the type that Justin has shown, and resembling Gadgeteer boards. They will also be available in a production-ready din-rail format, using a snap-together bus that fits within the din rail. That means that you can buy ready-to-field components like controllers, radios, current-loop, analog IO, digital IO, and relay switching components that snap together on the S-Connect din-rail bus. Scaling up just means buying more of these components.

Field-ready Al-extrusion cases with S-Connect cables are also a possibility, but they aren’t currently on the timeline. The current plan is just for bare boards and din-rail modules.

There will be three controllers (two STM32, and one OSD3358 ) and three programming models : netmf (with or without use of a drag-drop hardware config designer), S-Blocks (a drag and drop programming model that includes Kahlman filters, bangbang, PID loops, etc), and Linux with Docker support. The production-ready components will include cryptographic hw and sw elements for secure firmware, updates, and cloud interactions.

The drag/drop designers and programming environments are currently being developed within VS-Code.

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@ mcalsyn - I love the idea of the DIN rail bus. How will that extend out to on-device controls? For example, if I need a “smart” relay on a piece of machinery that is 110V or 220V @ 30A+ and can also monitor current usage, runtimes, etc.? Are you building those types of modules also or just the parts that would reside within the control panel enclosure? I definitely don’t want to have run all my mains wiring to a single control panel.

A common DIN bus sounds more like a GO! type model than Gadgeteer. Is that what you’re doing? A micro on every module?

:slight_smile:

@ ianlee74 - My understanding is that you can obtain motor controllers that are driven by a current or voltage loop, so you can keep the controller close to the motor and drive it with a signal from one of our IO modules. Alternatively, you could talk to similar remote units via CAN, ProfiNet, DeviceNet, etc.

Regarding the bus design - sort of, except based on CAN and allowing for much longer distances and more interesting topologies. S-Connect is the CAN-based protocol used on the din-rail bus. Separate modules and connectors will provide access to CAN, Profinet, DeviceNet and more.

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Its definitely getting more and more exciting! :slight_smile:

@ Justin - as some of you know I am building battery driven devices that are deployed in the field for agricultural og animal monitoring, including some mechanical stimuli (speakers, gates, feeding machines, etc). Often used for research and therefore your two types of connectors is very meaningful to me. Also the box-challenge is always hard on me, looking for IP65 boxes that match my prototypes is a mess.

PS: This is an answer to the what are you gonna build?

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@ njbuch - Yes, you know my email address :wink:

@ Justin, @ mcalsyn: how about VB?

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There’s one of [em]those[/em] guys in every crowd… :wink:

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You know we will will look after the Great Unwashed :wink:

Have one of these VB’s instead and teach yourself C# :slight_smile:

To be fair, more folks use C# with NETMF than VB and you’ll find more samples etc for it. Well worth learning and not far off the VB you are used to.

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@ Dave McLaughlin - That is abuse of alcohol. Who lets beer sit around long enough to get dusty?

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Good point. A flogging is in order.

Unless it’s a Fosters. Then that’s totally acceptable down under. In fact, mandated.

But Crocodile Dundee likes it? Doesn’t that mean all Aussies like it??? :wink:

This thread has definitely launched into space…

Yea, I guess @ Justin better show us something new and help reel us back in :wink:

@ mcalsyn - well let me assist in getting it back to the galaxy it came in on.

Radios.

So if you can say, what are we talking about? RFM 95s, RFM69s, Bluetooth 5 or something exotic from that solar system with 7 planets wd will all be moving to next year?

(edit). I see you mentioned Lora in an earlier post.

Hoges got paid a shedload of money, he could buy what beer he wanted after that, and I bet I know what it wasn’t :wink: It was/is a pretty successful export - virtually no one here drinks it so they had to get rid of it somehow.

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Faw-stuhs. Aw-Strine fo bee-yah.