MS1 Hardware Update

During certain world events of the last six years, certain typical industrial control hardware we use became unobtainium for long periods of time.

In addition, we kept running into the same common annoyances:

• “It would be nice to have an inexpensive little controller for this”

• “It would be nice if the controller we used last time was still for sale” (Not an Allen-Bradley complaint! They are quite good at long term support/sales. Please don’t email)

• “It would be nice if an off-the-shelf controller could easily interface with this i2c/SPI/UART sensor we want to use”

• “It would be nice if we could program our controller hardware in programming languages that our computer science grads like”

• “It would be nice if this hardware was open enough that we could just replace the chips that are unavailable with alternatives that are available”

In a fit of misplaced confidence, the decision was made to “just make our own.” Some four years later, we are about there.

If you want to see our early “caveman art” hardware, check out our github repo for this project. Currently, you can only see up to our last iteration of “big board” designs - one monolithic board with all necessary hardware on it. We found out the hard way some of the reason(s) backplane and slot architectures are so popular. In our case, iterating a modular architecture was so much cheaper, we pretty much have to use it until all the bugs are shaken out. We may make a big board again someday, but…not today.