Also new to the spreadsheet:
Six boards by the Indian company Bhasha, all through-hole except for the FTDI USB chips, mostly simple designs but it's clear from the traces that the boards were reworked slightly. Interesting to see the "Severino" Single Sided Serial V3 design offered for sale, something I haven't seen elsewhere.- Zigduino by Logos Electromechanical is offering their first run of IEEE 802.15.4 radio-equipped boards for $70. I've been looking forward to these boards coming out, but the price seems high given that you could buy an Arduino FIO for $25 and an XBee module for $19, so $44 total, or a Freakduino Chibi for $33. I hope the high price is only for this first run and that it is lower when Logos goes into full scale production, but I also wonder if it's as easy to use as the widely available XBee modules for which there are many example sketches available. It does have XBee "Pro" capabilities though, and I'm not familiar enough with 802.15.4 to really compare it to other offerings. I look forward to more complete documentation on its specs along with full design files since it's unclear what its equipment and capabilities are.
Thanks for writing about the Zigduino. I'll be releasing more documentation as the release date approaches. Full design files will be available as soon as it's ready to ship. A more complete spec sheet will be the next thing I release.
ReplyDeleteIt is somewhat harder to use than the XBee, since you have to deal more directly with the stack. In exchange, you have the flexibility to use a number of different protocols, depending on your particular needs.
One of its biggest advantage over other solutions, like an XBee shield or the like is that using the radio does not interfere with the Arduino I/O. Something like an XBee shield takes up the serial port and does not stack well with many other shields, for example. Combined with the 128K of flash available, this gives it a lot more flexibility than any of the alternatives currently on the market.