Introducing CBETA, a plug and play board based on 1284p

Other Hardware Hardware Development
1

I'm working on a board called CBETA (For Control Beta, or if you read Russian, a name meaning 'bearer of light'). The main goal is to allow you to 'plug and play' a variety of boards with no wiring hassle. The board uses a 1284p, so there is plenty of RAM and program memory space.

I am looking for feedback on the board, such as placement or anything to add.

This board was made for boards from Adafruit, but I also have a design for boards from SparkFun. The board supports:

Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, Ethernet(Wiznet 5200), SD, 4-button keypad, DHT-22 sensor, 1-wire, 4-20 MA, amp sensor, I2C, Analog and Interrupt pins, external 2 MB EEPROM, and headers for LEDs with slots for resistors.

I've designed the board to fit in a NEMA-4 box, so it can be mobile and be exposed to rain.

Hopefully, this board will attract more programmers who are put off by learning to wire hardware at first, enabling them to develop complex projects with no initial hurdle of breadboarding.

I'm interested to hear your feedback. Thanks!

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Cool! It's all thru-hole so some can learn soldering by assembling a kit. A few sample project sketches will help attract more people to use your board. Which pin mapping are you using for 1284P?

3

Thanks for the input!

I'm using JChristensen's updated Mighty-1284p.

As for the through holes, once the layout is final, I want to convert it to SMDs, but the problem will be the female header pins. I would imagine that there is a way to automate the soldering of these since Arduino does it.

I'll be posting some example code soon. I have a few ideas, like an open wifi mapper, which uses a few of the modules.