Simply plug-n-play

1st June 16 19:30 IST
Sayan Bhattacharyya

The previous post highlights the fact that we wanted to make HackPOD portable and with the form factor of a smartphone. Well, that would obviously not be possible if projects are completed on a breadboard. Breadboard projects are messy and require extra wiring. And they are not pleasing to look at.

To remove this obstruction, we included a breadboard space in HackPOD's PCB. This will make your prototyping faster, easier and above all portable. No need for messy wiring. Just plug and play directly.

But there is another motivation to the story. We wanted to make HackPOD as easy as possible to interface Anything. In fact Avikalpa spent the entire summer of his sophomore year trying to figure out how to do that.

Instead of a handful of proprietary modules, we wanted a general solution.

Goals

• To use existing modules, shields or breakout boards.
• Like Arduino shields it has to be plug-n-play.
• These modules has to be as cheap as possible.

First, we thought of collecting how all breakouts from Adafruit, Sparkfun, Seeedstudios are labeled. Then we would just give the pinouts so as majority of the boards can be connected. But it was a compromise. Most of them would still be incompatible.

Then, a eureka moment happened.

• Arrange the pins on the sides
• Make the first two rows of the protoboard interconnected.
• Make the connection of the pins as needed by the breakout on the 2nd row.
• Connect the breakout on the first row.

This procedure made all the breakouts compatible in a plug-n-play fashion. The incompatible ones are the ones

• which needs more pins than the HackPOD can provide (No breakout on the market satisfies this)
• which has more pins than a row of the HackPOD protoboard (only some audio breakouts from Adafruit and Sparkfun satify this condition)

Hence, this way we can

• Make HackPOD compatible to all pre-existing modules adding to consumers' delight.
• Almost everything is compatible
• No need for HackPOD "only" modules adding to module makers' delight.
• Also breakouts are much cheaper than shields. It satisfies our "Quality first, Affordability a close second" mantra.

This puts HackPOD as a first-class citizen as you're never be short of modules.

There's so much to do with HackPOD. Build something already.

Start Hacking Already !!