We are happy to announce that every Backer who has pledged $81 and above will be getting an “ARDUINO UNO†(clone) with their reward.

The Initial Spark

We often faced lot of issues with multiple voltage levels, too many adapters & regulators in almost all our projects.  

We also realized that in many instance we do require some basic add on boards like RTC, Temperature sensor, IMU etc. Adding many add-on board clutters your board and makes it difficult to debug. Not just this you even need to take care of the mounting of these boards.  

Our favourite boards, the Arduino Uno and Raspberry Pi are both required in most automation projects but there are cases where only one of them will do. The problem was that each of them have different shields and both of them operate at different voltage levels.  

Many tinkerers use motors as actuators specially in a robotic application and in case your application is mobile it needs a battery along with it you also need a charging circuit so these addition keep on complicating the system with lot of wires and consumes lot of space.  

Keeping these points in mind we started developing the shield called the “Bridge Shield” where we have addressed most of the points mentioned above.

Bridge Shield Features

• 10 DOF IMU (Accelerometer, Gyro, Magneto, Baro).
• Compatible with Arduino Mega.
• Two cell 7.4V Lithium Ion battery charger with led and signal pins to monitor battery charge status.
• RTC with coin cell backup provision.
• Open 5V-3.3V bidirectional voltage level converter.  
• Level Shifting for SPI, I2C, UART between Arduino Uno & Raspberry Pi.
• Temperature Sensor.
• Dual Bridge motor driver which can drive motors up to 1Amp.
• 8 channel Servo Motor Diver which works on I2C.
• Attiny85 micro-controller loaded with Arduino boot loader.
• IR Sensor for wireless remote control.
• USB to UART converter.
• Single input source of 12V which power Pi and Arduino Uno.
• One variable voltage regulator of 3A.
•  5V/3A voltage regulator. 
•  3.3V/1A voltage regulator.
• Intensity variable LED controlled through I2C.
• Header for ESP8266 Wi-Fi Module.  
• Header for HC-05 Bluetooth Module.
• Its mechanical construction makes it compatible with most of the stack able Arduino Uno, Arduino Mega and Raspberry Pi shields.

What can you do with it?

You can build a internet controlled Tele-operated Robot or an autonomous robot or a self-balancing robot or make best use of the 10 DOF to create a drone. You can use it for home automation to control you light, fan etc.

By combining both Arduino and Raspberry Pi the application one can achieve are unlimited and beyond imagination. It is up to you how you can use our board to build tinkered projects which are fun and innovative.

We have completed the first prototype and are presently testing it. We are in the process on modifying our design and developing a second prototype and we are open to suggestion and need your help to develop and manufacture the bridge shield.

Where are we? and what is yet to be done

We have made a prototypes, and we are developing respective library and examples for the Bridge Shield. We have asked our manufacture for assistance regarding DFM and mass production.

In a couple of days we will make our present code, examples available on our GitHub .We will make both the software code and hardware open sourced by the end of this campaign.

If this product is successfully funded, our focus will be on three things:

Developing Application examples:

After lot of effort and understanding we have come to a conclusion that if we show people examples on how this board can be used and share that example people actually learn and improvise. There is a possibility that they may come up with their own product. So we want to produce a lot of a library and application examples with this shields to make sure bridge shield users have an easy start in developing their own application. Doing this takes a lot of human resource and effort.

Developing the Bridge Shield for more flexibility and value addition:

We also wish to take a lot of feedback form the crowd funding website so that we can integrate at least some of it in the upcoming design and keep the cost minimum. We also wish to know the ergonomical perspective one gets from the first prototype so that we can improve it. Depending on the present user feedback and your valuable feedback we will release a new design.

Developing a custom image for the Pi with Bridge Shield:

The Pi OS needs a few changes made in order to make it work with Bridge Shield. In order to make the Bridge Shield as easy to use as possible, we will develop a custom image for download that will allow users to get started right out of the box, with minimal setup.

Share this and Help Us

This project will be an open source project. For any open source project building a community is essential. We will be sharing both the hardware and software as soon as we can. We also need your help in making this project popular. You can do this by sharing this project in your circle. Just press the share buttons. Together we can make this project a success.

The People

We are a small group of professionals who like to develop easy simple boards to execute hobby projects. The group consists of both well experienced as well has young and dynamic people capable of handling projects from design to production. We have in our team multidisciplinary design engineers as well as professional production and quality control people. This is our first crowd funding project but we assure you that we will see to that each of our project backer will be satisfied with our systematic approach and by our scheduled project product delivery.

We also take up design and development work along with manufacturing of projects. If you have any such project which you wish to outsource you can contact us.

Thank You

Armtronix