BUSduino - free SMD prototyping kit for Arduino(TM) - specs preliminary draft

Hello all,

  • what is this??

It's all about (positive) photo-resist pre-sensitized single-sided PCBs containing additional grooves and blind holes milling/drilling and about defining set of standard card/board sizes, having them deliverable in reasonably sized panels. There is easy way to break panel to smaller form-factors with protected photo-resist on them, so only specific selected card/board sizes can be quickly developed/etched on demand, without complicated large PCB board cutting and precision drilling of standard connection pads holes. Whole copper area is initially available for SMD parts placement and really required holes can be quickly drilled through by small handheld tool as needed. Cards can be connected to very easily modified genuine Arduino(TM) Proto Shield, custom made clone of it or optionaly also on passive backplane board connected by glued/soldered "overlay" boards with 2 connector variants to cards reverse side.

Feel free to browse pictures, download the ZIP (13MB ) and peek at BUSduino-readme.txt (26kB) file for detailed descriptions and the whole background story (ZIP contains current BUSduino-readme.txt, DipTrace *.dip + *.lib files + models3d folder and all exported PNGs as in gallery). To open all dip-files you need only latest FREE version of DipTrace software in case you will continue with your own non-commercial use.

Since start, it was only idea and theoretical possibility for easy home prototype boards development without precision/solid cutting/drilling tools, but now I am already in contact with few appropriate PCB producers,
to define production data and to make some real samples of such larger "breakable" panels - as soon as this will be available, I will post it all here too.

This specification isn't completed and it hasn't form of regular document so any contributions are welcomed, as its licensed under Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0

Thanks,
falken[at]busduino[dot]com

http://www.busduino.com

Updates:
130206 - real samples production/manufacturing data design is in progress, stay tuned :slight_smile:

Bring back the bus.

I've been an advocate of a real bus system for Arduino for ages, remember the days of S100 et al where you could make plug-in boards that were addressable and therefore could co-exist without the pin clash issues that Arduino shields have? I've even designed a few myself and currently have PCBs in production that implement a bus (don't worry, totally different form factor).

I also like the idea of a standard for small plug-in boards, using an entire shield for simple things (like an RS-485 interface) as happens now is ridiculous.

I can see you've implemented the beginnings of a bus here, but admit I'm having trouble putting all the pieces together, I see small plug-in boards, shields, and a backplane but does the backplane connect to an Arduino? If so how?

The other requirement of a bus is addressability, there must be a method to address boards so they can all share pins. This is either done on the backplane with individual select signals for each board or you designate certain signals for this purpose and have on-board select logic. There are pros and cons either way.


Rob