My company is a well established professional R&D electronics company based in Adelaide S.A.
Not sure if this is the right place to post but thought we would as we use the PCB service and are happy with the support.
About a year ago we developed a product for a client that connected to their company intranet and allowed factory automation and supervision via web browser interface.
It was based on a Microchip PIC24F and used their open source TCP/IP stack.
The board was only 50mmx50mm and proved very successful.
The unit had 8 I/O pins for driving relays and detecting switches as well as a few A/D.
The webpage was served from a USB thumb drive and the board had USBOTG master support.
We then further upgraded the design to use the Microchip WiFi module which meant there was no need for a wired connection.
Unfortunately the company that ordered this design went belly-up (left a lot of unpaid bills!) due to poor management and now We have a really neat design with no home!
Would this be something worth investing in to get 100 units made either wired or WiFi.
Whats the interest like?
We dont normally market we usually just do proof of concepts and design.
Hi Eric,
Sounds really cool. It’s interesting, and we are also making a similar product called Dragrove, which is combing Dragino and an Arduino Shield with Grove connectors.
They may have the similar functions.
Please tell me more details about your products( wired and wireless). How to use? Any documentation?
Sorry for the delay in getting back.
Have a few large projects on the go.
Here is the link to a picture and some information for the PCB tecy.com.au/tecy1a_007.htm
Based on a PIC24FJ256GB106 so will run the Microchip TCPIP Stack with only a small change to the hardware description file which we provide.
The TCPIP stack from Microchip has a demo server that will serve from a thumb drive that this PCB supports.
Board also will work with the USB and SD card libraries from Microchip.
The Microchip stack and libraries are well documented and freely available for use on Microchip devices.
Microchip also provides programing suport and has useful forums.
Functionally the two versions are very similar just the wired version is cheaper as it does not need a WiFi module.
Hi Eric,
Sorry, but the link doesn’t work here.
I’m worried about the subsequent support for this product. Are you going to support that, which means you need to make a full user manual, application note, and also show customer how it is easy to be used.
Without that, we are not sure it’s valuable to make and sell them.
We will provide circuit and hardware file but that would be were the support ends.
Its for people that know what they are doing and what it is worth.
Thought we would put it out there.
We have to give some work to a work experience student and getting him to create all the user documentation for this PCB would be an ideal job.
What would you require.
I was thinking datasheet with circuit diagram and pin descriptions.
including manufacturer datasheets for micro and MAK.
application example demo software.
Would that make it something you could sell?
Regards
Eric.
P.S. we also have other projects that we would be happy to sell as we encourage our R&D engineers to 10% “tinker time” which comes up with some interesting projects.