OK, I’m thinking I need a new project to “create” a new module. One where there’s a gap in the existing market, or where there’s one that the existing product doesn’t fill sufficiently, or that serves a greater purpose (like it would be great addition for education kits). Does anyone have any suggestions ? Anyone with a burning need that hasn’t been fulfilled that they want a hand to design a module for?
(Justin, I’m not trying to mow your lawn. In fact, if we got back to TGIF’s more often I might even be placated into abandoning this thought And no there’s no pressure from me )
If you are looking for a reliable pH Sensor check out Atlas Scientific’s pH Sensor. I have been using one in my Pool Monitor for a while now. It is reliable and has a simple Serial Interface.
I am using this with a Cerb 40 II in pure NetMF. It works great. They are not cheap ($105 for a pH Kit).
I have written a NetMF Driver for the module that I created. They have a whole line of sensors as well.
Living close the manufacturing plant, I have had the opportunity to visit. The Tech support is top notch as well.
pH - there is/was one from Love but as we know they’re not really in the game anymore. I however love the Atlas suggestion. Personally I think that the precision nature of the “problem” along with the relatively low perceived demand would dissuade me taking the challenge on - perhaps all we need is an adapter for a U/K socket for the UART model from Atlas?
ADS-B. Interesting, but I suspect extremely low potential demand. No reference design that I could see also makes it hard to design it into a solution. Maybe there are alternative products, but without the domain knowledge I couldn’t be sure…
Si4713. Interesting. I however cringe when I hear anything about transmitting, there’s often a huge hurdle there. I’ll dig more into what SiLabs provide as a leg up on this one
In the USA, the FCC allows unlicensed transmitters if they only broadcast about 200 feet. Useful for schools, churches, campsites, neighborhoods, etc. The thing about the Si4713 is that it has RDS encoding built-in.
Anything to do with water quality sensors, pH, dissolved Oxygen, etc, in fact any sensor like that tends to get my wallet excite.
I’d love to see someone build a base module for hooking up Ultrasonic distance sensors. There are a number of models where the sensor in/out is the same so if someone were to build a base module where you could plug in whatever ultrasonic sensor suits the need (something like the gas sensor).
We talked a long time ago about a module could measure current etc used by modules plugged into it (ie in series) and this is still a good idea. Here is the link to that discussion https://www.ghielectronics.com/community/forum/topic?id=8742
RFID 13.56MHz module would be good as would a good proximity module, or even next step up in gas sensor quality. Of course radiation would be great as well. There was a hint from Gus awhile ago about a better camera module.
Of course if someone made an optical tracking module that operated on random oscillating frequencies to counter counter measures, that would save me some time.
Duke, I made a module for myself that measures 0 to 200mA current with 1uA precision. It uses a 16 bit A/D converter and a low noise op-amp so that the measuring resistor is only 0.1 ohm. I made it so that I could measure average current used by battery operated equipment in order to estimate battery life expectancy. It works really well and I thought it was really useful for my requirements. But I did not get the impression that a lot of other people on this forum needed something like it as well.
@ KiwiSaner your killing me. I can’t imagine why someone wouldn’t want this as when building devices, power is king so understand module power usage is important, and if you build or use 3rd party modules being able to measure its power requirements is even more important, given you don’t like have the power data available in visual studio (which is nice, but I like measured numbers better).
Now that said I can’t understand folks as there are some really killer 3rd party modules out there from a number of different folks and I’m can’t believe these guys aren’t shoveling money into the furnace in order to get rid of some of it, as sales are burying them in cash. 3rd party modules are in my mind one of the biggest features of Gadgeteer so I do what I can to support 3rd party module builders, but often I hear that sales volumes aren’t what I think they should be. Hopefully that will change soon.
Now all that said if you want to run a business you have to behave like a business and that means support and drivers in order to build the reputation and of course a store where we can find the modules (is there something about stores that you Kiwi’s don’t like or something?)
I have a beta product that I’m working on that I hope will raise the visibility of Gadgeteer and all the cool things that people are building with it, including 3rd party modules, but today I ran into a snag that might take a bit of work to get it to where I want it before releasing, but if it was easy, it already be done, so code on.
So lets talk about this module of yours, how much and how do I get one?
Brett, the Si4721 looks good. We already have the Si4703 receiver on the Radio FM1 module, but a combined module would be great if the cost wasn’t much higher.
I was thinking more of the cost of the board size for the addition of the extra support circuit for both the transmit and receive sides of the application. The Si Labs chips are often very highly integrated and not much external circuit is needed in many cases. A transceiver module wold certainly be very cool.
And no there’s no pressure from me 
