"Give me 6 hours to cut down a tree, and I will spend the first 4 sharpening the axe!" - Abraham Lincoln
The open-source hardware initiative which was started in 1997 has given birth to amazing hardware and software revolutions. The Arduino Project has been one of the most successful open-source hardware and software project ever created with nearly more than 700,000 official boards sold in 2013. While the availability of open-source hardware has made it easier for students, hobbyists and DIY-hackers both amateur and professional to tweak and tinker around with various development boards, sensors and shields to develop some really cool projects, they are still burdened with redundant tasks which include being vigil about the voltage and current supply, integrating different thousand other sensors while making sure there is hardware minimisation.
All these problems and also few inherent technical limitations of existing development boards gave rise to - "the Accexlron." The accexlron is a new and improved rapid prototyping development board developed by me and my team at Tweak Labs Inc. Our startup is fairly obscure for a global audience, but nonetheless we are doing some exciting work by acting as an electronic components aggregator who provides technical assistance, develops open-source hardware for augmenting projects in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities in India.
Just like Abraham Lincoln spending 4 hours on sharpening the axe, present day developers, DIY-hackers and students spend a lot of time deciding which components to use that will help them to arrive at a prototype faster. To circumvent such redundant tasks, we are excited to present our very own development board. The technical specifications of the board are as follows:
- It is based on the famous high performance ATmega2560 IC with advanced RISC architecture, having a throughput of 16 MIPS at 16Mhz clock speed.
- It has 54 Digital I/O pins and 16 analog pins that allows for making complex projects with lot of interfacing hardware.
- High endurance non-volatile memory and 256KB Flash memory allowing larger sketch space.
- Presence of two monolithic high voltage, high current dual full-bridge driver -L298N, which provides built-in motor driver capability. Drives 4 high torque motors, 4-5 servo motors without breaking a sweat.
- Plug and play compliance for Bluetooth and WiFi. Just connect your modules and start using them.
- >35V voltage threshold.
The board was primarily developed to help hardware startups, DIY-hackers and students to arrive at their prototype much faster, because the board is inherent with features like higher voltage and current thresholds, this means the user doesn't have to worry about frying his board while his project is highly intensive. The presence of motor driver circuitry further simplifies the process of interfacing third-party motor drivers or shields. The board is capable of driving high torque motors and also drive servo motors simultaneously without a snag. Further the presence of bluetooth and wifi plug-n-play compliancy allows the user to just plug his Bluetooth Module or Wifi Module (ESP-8266) and enable communication and networking protocols for his project. In this video embedded below, shows one of our DIY-hacker has built a simple robot arm using servo motors and Accexlron. The servo motors used are SG-90 micro servo and MG995 metal gear servo. Any DIY-hobbyist who has interfaced multiple servo motors onto an Arduino Uno or Arduino Mega knows how difficult it is to drive these motors without the help of special driver circuit or power supply. Our board is perfectly capable of driving multiple servo motors simultaneously.