A closer look at what the MetaBoard does

Before looking at how this works, let's look at what it does. Here is a prototype of a user interface, the IO markers at the bottom represent the pins in your breadboard, and the horizontal lines represent channels, or jumpers to which the IO pins can be connected. Finally, we also have addons, which are useful tools or features which can act on channels, in this case we see an ADC addon reading the signal on channels 0, 3 and 4.
Here we can see the IO 0 pin connected to channel 6, and the second not connected. If we were to connect IO 1 to channel 6, we would have a connection between the two pins which we can monitor with the ADC addon.

Controller Board

The controller board is what connects your PC (or other MCU) to your breadboard, and links all the adjacent controller boards together. It is 8 or 16 pins wide, and has a port on either side for lateral expansion, linking with other controller boards to seamlessly expand the pin count. The controller board has a port for stacking switch boards and addon boards, which are detailed below.

Switch Boards

Switch boards are where we make the magic happen. The switch boards form and break connections between the IO pins and the channels. They have one stacking port on either side so that you can join as many boards as you like, yielding an unlimited number of channels. Like the controller boards, these switch boards also have lateral expansion ports to with adjacent stacks, yielding unlimited IO pins.

Addon Boards

Addon boards are where you make the magic happen. The Addon boards can contain anything, and we offer blank addon boards so that you can create your own. If you want higher precision ADC , a DAC , a MIDI controller , an SoC , wifi adapter or an FPGA, you can plug and play directly from your MetaBoard! This is especially useful for students and software engineers who want to plug and play with powerful and complex devices.

When can we expect specs for the MetaBoard?

We are planning to have specs for the first consumer versions of the MetaBoard in Q1 2017, and start shipping shortly thereafter. We are working on designs for high current and performance models, and as for the standard model, we can promise the following:

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