Now (standard) Motor shield is retired and Adafruit's Motor FeatherWing is available, I think a MKR Motor shield is a must in Arduino catalog
They already made one. They're currently only selling it as part of the Arduino Engineering Kit:
https://store.arduino.cc/usa/arduino-engineering-kit
It's different from the usual Arduino shield in that the MKR board sits on top of it:
Ooh, I didn't notice, thanks!
But then...why isn't it sold as a standalone product!!!??
q2dg:
Ooh, I didn't notice, thanks!
But then...why isn't it sold as a standalone product!!!??
It's open source. Make up a few hundred, and sell them yourself.
Obviously, it was a marketing decision, and who the heck knows what they were thinking.
It doesn't seem very open source to me. Do you know where the board design files, or even schematic, are?
pert:
It doesn't seem very open source to me. Do you know where the board design files, or even schematic, are?
Ooh, bad assumption on my part. I thought all the Arduino stuff was open source.
If you don't mind I can open an issue in github about this fact to see if there's any official response
It's certainly worth a try. It seems that Arduino generally waits until after they are actually shipping a product before posting the source files. They started selling the Engineering Kit ~2.5 months ago. It might well be that they just forgot to update the product page. Of course there are arguments they could make for and against publishing board design files but certainly there should be no harm in at least posting a schematic and I'd consider that a very important piece of documentation for a product sold to educate engineers.
Out of interest, I looked at all the other product pages and found these are missing source files:
- https://store.arduino.cc/usa/mkr-proto-shield
- MKR SD Proto Shield — Arduino Official Store
- Arduino MKR CAN Shield — Arduino Official Store
- Arduino MKR 485 Shield — Arduino Official Store
- Arduino MKR Mem Shield — Arduino Official Store
- Arduino MKR Connector Carrier (Grove compatible) — Arduino Official Store
- Arduino Yún Rev 2 — Arduino Official Store
- ARDUINO UNO WiFi REV2 — Arduino Official Store
- Arduino MKR NB 1500 — Arduino Official Store
- Arduino MKR ETH Shield — Arduino Official Store
These have only schematics:
- Arduino MKR WiFi 1010 — Arduino Official Store
- Arduino MKR Vidor 4000 — Arduino Official Store
- Boards — Arduino Official Store
Other than the Yun Mini, they are either not yet being sold or very new so I think it's better to give Arduino some time before requesting those.
There was also a report that the Tian and Arduino Industrial 101 .DSN files are only schematics, not board design files:
https://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=483772.msg3302961#msg3302961
That's a bit old but I've never heard anything about it being resolved.
I believe some of the files are marked with "All rights reserved" sort of text, contrary to Arduino's claim that they are all CC-BY-SA licensed. I know for sure this is the case with the Arduino 101 board file:
Many other files simply don't specify any license, which would tend to be interpreted as defaulting to "All rights reserved":
I know there is debate about whether its possible to copyright hardware designs but I'd guess the design files themselves can indeed have copyrights. Regardless, it makes sense to always provide specific license documentation to prevent any confusion, even if it may not be absolutely necessary.
Done! Missing source files of several products · Issue #7813 · arduino/Arduino · GitHub
Thanks a lot!!
We will see...