I'm very new at this Linux thing, but I really love what I'm learning so far using Carambola. I can see it in many of my projects in the future.

I do a lot of development on the road, so I wanted to have a dev board that would need just one cable to my laptop. So I came up with this little guy, which I gave the goofy name "SimpleHolder". You plug one of those FTDI USB to serial cables into it, an it supplies 5V power and console serial to the Carambola, and then I use the WiFi for the network connection.

Also, there are pins to use this little board as an Arduino shield. I've only brought out one of the two Ethernet ports. All Carambola pins are accessible as .100" headers.

I threw this together last weekend, without giving a whole lot of thought to it. I'm certain there are mistakes. I haven't gotten the boards back from the board house yet, so I don't know if it works. I'm sure there will be future versions with better connections between the Carambola and the Arduino, but at least this is a start.

For anyone who wants to use it, please go ahead. Released under creative commons attribution license, so you can do whatever you want with it as long as you give me attribution. I'm getting 6 boards of this v1.0 made, all of which are spoken for.

For future versions, I've thought of going to all through hole components and making it a kit or something. I'm sure a lot of Arduino people would like to have this as a shield.

Anyway, here's a link to the zip of the Eagle files, PDFs of the schematic and board, and gerbers:


Note that not all of the component values are filled in yet - like I said, this was really thrown together in a couple hours, and needs some final touches (like schematic cleanup and BOM) but if somebody else wants to use it, I thought it should get out there sooner than later.

Here's a PDF of the board layout:

And a PDF of the schematic:


*Brian

Perfect, I was just thinking in one like this.
Did you build a lib component for carambola?
I am thinking, first of all, in build a lib cmoponent for cabambola, but if you had done it already I would like to reuse it.
Thanks in advance.
Paco

Yup, I did, but I forgot to mention that. Here is is:



*Brian

Our Caramola-Arduino shield version.

Oh, sweet. Yours is way cooler than mine.

When will it be available for purchase?

*Brian

I built a little board based for Carambola as well:



It's got a 5V -> 3.2V switch mode DC-DC converter (ONsemi NCP3170), a header for a SparkFun pinout FTDI cable/board, USB receptacle and connectors for an RGB LED strip and I2C. It's 70mm x 80mm (not counting the USB socket)



I've got some spare bare PCB's so if anyone is interested just let me know.

Sweet! Your board looks awesome David.

*Brian

nice work!
We are also working on a device with the carambola as the "brain", there will be news in the near future!