Mike D. @ ITP

Thanks in no small part to the excellent write-up from my friend and Socialbomb compatriot Adam Simon, I’ve shipped my first round of boards out to Advanced Circuits for printing. The thesis marches on!

The boards for the personal unit are both done — microphone circuit on top, Arduino on bottom — and should be here quick (Advanced Circuits RULES). The mic circuit board will make the next steps easy, and the Arduino board will make it possible to make cheap, tiny arduinos as a part of nearly everything. There are pin-outs on each board so that they can interface with others fairly easily. The sensor boards (in this case the mic board) has a six-pin out that could go either to a microcontroller or straight to an Xbee or Xport, and the Arduino boards have a six-pin out that could either go straight to a computer (through a TTL-232 cable like the ones Limor Fried sells) or to a logger unit, and there’s access to the analog ins, RX/TX and digital pins 2/3 (for SoftSerial) for any GPS/location-aware tech.

(The aforementioned TTL-232 cable)

I’ve also revised the previously-kinda-huge logger circuit to include the new uSD logger from Sparkfun — it crams the same DOSonCHIP functionality into a teensy package that fits on a board the same size as the ones I’m using, so my original goal of having a ton of add-on boards for extra functionality is even more feasible now.  Either print one up, use one of mine, or just go to yer local RadioShack and solder up your own!

(Bottom-to-top: that’s the old logger, the new logger, and a 232 board for size reference)

I’m only going with the BareBonesPCB option they have, as it’s dirt cheap and fast, but if this all works I’ll print up prettier versions. I’ll also need to add

I’ve also based the size on the small square boards Radioshack sells (which I used for the prototype), as they’re juuuust big enough to accommodate an Atmega8/168 and readily available so additions to the platform are quick and easy to prototype and implement.

Of course, as things happen when one is facing a deadline, that it’s taken me the better part of a week to mock up the boards, test them out on paper, plan them around kit-available-and-cheap parts and fix the errors, but they should be here on Friday — yay!

Disclaimer: EAGLE is fun, functional, and free — but it may drive you a little crazy. If you’re thinking about doing up boards of your own, you might want to search Instructables for a tutorial (there are a bunch of good ones!) or talk to someone who’s done boards before.