原创 Dr. Duino succeeded!

Do you remember my recent blog about the Dr. Duino diagnostic shield that you can use to diagnose problems in your Arduino Uno and chipKIT Uno32 shield stacks?

Designed by Guido Bonelli Jr., this little scamp was a successfully funded Kickstarter Project. Well, I was just rooting around SparkFun's website (I can't help myself, they have so much cool stuff with which they keep on tempting me) when I saw that Dr. Duino is right up there on the front page as a "Kickstarter Staff Pick," which is a pretty good endorsement if you ask me.

I am glad it succeeded, because I really want one of these little beauties myself. As I said in my previous blog on this topic:

Now, this is the clever bit. Although it's not immediately obvious from the image above, the header pins sticking out of the bottom of the Dr. Duino (the ones that plug into the board above) and the corresponding headers sticking out of the top of the Dr. Duino (the ones into which the board above will be connected) are offset. By means of jumpers on the Dr. Duino, you can either pass the signal directly through from the board below to the board above (and vice versa, of course), or you can break the connection between the adjacent boards and route the signal to one of the components on the Dr. Duino.

In the case of the six analog input pins available on the Arduino Uno, for example, the Dr. Duino provides each of them with a 10KΩ potentiometer that you can "jumper-in." The reason this is of interest is that I was building myself a set of animatronic robot eyes over the weekend (there wasn't anything good on TV), and I realized needed four 10KΩ pots in order to fine-tune the eye movements (each eye can turn left-to-right independently) and the eyelid movements (each eyelid can blink independently).

Wouldn't you know it, I realized I was out of 10KΩ pots (I'd used the last of my existing stash on another project). That was the moment when I thought to myself, "Oooh, I so wish I had a Dr. Duino right now!" Quite apart from anything else, I really want this Kickstarter to succeed, because if it does, Guido says he would be interested in my thoughts as to what should be on a bigger version for use with Arduino Mega and chipKIT Max32-based systems.

Since I constantly seem to have numerous projects on the go using both of these platforms, this is an amazing opportunity for me to provide input with regard to the diagnostic capabilities I've discovered a need for over recent months. How about you? If you could add anything to the current Dr. Duino board or to a future board, what would that be?