Greetings all,
I wasn’t sure exactly where to post this but thought it would be general enough for General Discussions.
The purpose of this post is to “showcase” if you will, a concept we have been tinkering with over the last year or so and obtain feedback as to the possible direction we wish to take this.
So, the background: As (mostly electrical) engineers that provide solutions in the industrial communications space, we have experienced many moments of frustration with the lack of a complete, industrial grade “IoT-type” hardware platform that meets our general wish list, that looks something like the following:
- It is of a reasonable cost, considering the industrial grade requirement.
- It is packaged and ready to use. The less hardware development we have to do, the better.
- It is modular at a hardware interface level to address different applications
- It should be programmable ideally from Visual Studio, so we can avoid having to brush up on our C development skills.
For many years we waited for our hardware nirvana but were unable to find something that fulfilled these criteria. After much on and off tinkering, we bit the bullet and decided to build something ourselves. .NET micro and GHI’s solutions seemed to provide the closest starting point to what we wanted to achieve.
The result is what we call Nexus, based around the G400-D module. We’ve tried to incorporate all the hardware features, in our experience, we think are important to a product like this, such as:
- Fully isolated 9-30V power supply and signals/connections.
- Main power sensing (such as in an ignition or battery power sensing scenario).
- Six isolated expansion IO modules that are easy to develop. Four of the slots are fully Mikrobus signal compatible.
- On board Ethernet, USB, EEPROM and microSD card.
- Super Cap for short term power bridging and/or safe device shutdown
- Basic LEDs for status information plus the option for an LCD TFT display when required.
Right now, we have created the following basic isolated slot modules:
- CAN
- RS232
- RS485
- 8x Digital input & output
- 8x Relay
- GPS
We’re also cooking up some Micro-based modules for specific applications and Ethernet/TCP -based protocols, as well as a common double-slot interface for the HMS Anybus CompactCOM line of industrial communications interfaces.
On the software front, we’ve created a hardware .net Micro API for the device to handle all the hardware-related stuff such as ensuring safe SD card writes in conjunction with the super-cap power circuit.
Nexus is currently being used in a proof-of-concept project for a large mining company for data monitoring purposes. However, that aside, right now we are considering whether making Nexus available as a bare-bone version (with CE/FCC compliance) is a viable prospect, that is, provide the hardware and hardware API as a standalone product.
I thought a good place to start would be the GHI community - we would value and appreciate any input or suggestions at this point.