Arduino based development board

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) General Bar Sport
1

Hi All,

We are glad to announce Simpleduino - An Arduino Clone Development Board. I understand that it takes away the simplicity of arduino by adding on-board features but this has been included after serious considerations and analysis of requirements for students in the local environment.

http://simplelabs.co.in/drupal/products/ard-dev-board

All feedback welcome.

Cheers,
Prakash

2

Nice; will you be releasing CAD files?

3

I understand that it takes away the simplicity of arduino

and it adds to the price.

It's probably OK for teachers and administrators, but by divorcing the hands on electronics part and having it pre built is depriving the students of a vital part of the embedded experience. They will view it as the system as a whole and not as an arduino with pre built bits added on. This can confuse / intimidate.

Anyway just my thoughts.

4

westfw,

As of the moment i'm holding on the release as it has been designed by a friend as a favour and he has designed a PCB directly without a schematic. However I can send you the PCB layout(eagle) if you are interested.

mike,

thanks for your feedback. I totally agree with you, but the way things are around here it is difficult to implement that. We did try the serial and usb board on students and most of them seem to run into trouble with constructing the other hardware, leading to a lot of frustration when nobody was around to help them and this lead to a lot of them giving up even before they took a few steps. Most of them lack practical electronics skills and they view it as rather difficult. what we are now looking at is first to get them confident in developing simple projects(Once they are able to do this a few times, normally their confidence levels go up and they persist more) without running into much difficulties and boost their confidence. They then generally tend to explore the hardware with much more confidence. Perhaps you can take a look at the contents of the workshop and courses we've listed on the website and give your feedback.

As for the price, the whole kit comes at around 50$ + 4$ shipping. Similar kits are being sold here for a minimum of 65$. We will further reduce the price once more people start buying it.

Cheers,
Prakash