ACS (Amp Control System) is our flagship control product, and defines an entire family of hardware and software for machine control. We have used several variations of the Arduino platform for developing, and have added our own hardware and software extensions as required. We consider it important to give back to this community which has done so much to help us in developing this system. As such, we offer select components to the developer community at modest cost.
The ACS Nano is the centerpiece of the ACS system at the moment, which is currently in version 2.0. It is in essence an add-on shield for the Arduino Nano. The major feature of the ACS Nano board is the dedicated interfaces supplying power for the I2C interface. There is a dedicated port for common I2C displays with a pinout of GND, VCC, SDA, SCL. There are also two additional I2C ports which have dedicated interrupts, these ports use the INT(A/B), GND, VCC, SDA, SCL order. On board there is also the provision for two linear voltage regulators (7805 and 7812) which provide up to 1A each. This allows the board to power itself and it's peripherals from voltage supplies up to 30V+. Rather than deleting pins from the bus, the shield duplicates all of the pins coming from the arduino, the only exception are Analog 4 and Analog 5, which are used as the SDA/SCL pins. All of the other analog pins are connected to a SIP resistor network pulling them to ground with an impedence of 100K-ohms.
All IO pins are right next to a +5V bus for analog, and a GND bus for digital. This makes interfacing with common sensors like switches, IR sensors, voltage dividers and other peripherals very easy. For further utility, there are ten power connectors (5 at 5V, 5 at 12V or 5V). There is a power jumper that sets the output.
The ACS Nano board comes as a kit, complete with all of the components required to assemble it, an instruction sheet detailing the various ways it can be configured, and a schematic. We are currently working on sourcing all components from US based manufacturers, using genuine parts made in the USA. Our boards are made by OSHPark in the US state of Oregon. As we are still sourcing parts, we are working to bring the price close to the target of $50.
Our I2C GPIO Expander is based on the Microchip MCP23017 offering a total of 16bits of additional GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output) in two 8-bit busses. Much like the ACS Nano board, there are wide variety of ways this board can be used, so it does come as a kit. (we do solder on the 0604 SMT resistors for you) This board may be used for any project requiring large amounts of digital IO, including switch matrix input, or LED matrix output. The interrupt pins are intended to be interfaced to the ACS Nano allowing interrupts to be used on one or both registers, or you may OR them together in software. This board allows the address to be set to any of 4 I2C addresses (0x20-0x23) so you may daisy-chain that many boards off a single arduino.
The Expander may be used as either input or output, however, if it is to be used for output, the SIP Resistor network should not be soldered in. The PWRSEL jumper may be set to either VCC or GND, allowing you to turn on or turn off devices using the internal pull-up or pull-down.
Like the ACS Nano our GPIO Expander comes as a partially assembled kit, the board is 100% made in the USA again by OSHPark, and we are currently working to source all USA made components for the kit. Our target price is $25, and again, we solder on the SMT components to make life easier on you.