Fuck yeah! Looks awesome! Excited to see this oot and aboot. Any chance of selling PCBs or kits?
io board eh? If you need a beta tester, as in a dude who cant really solder but would love to test one out im on board
If there was a lot of interest in kits or a pre-made thing I might consider that. I will just make the boards available in EagleCAD format which can be used to have your own boards fabbed at a place like OSH Park (formally DorkBot) pretty inexpensively. They do medium runs too so if there was enough interest a bulk order of sorts could be organized.
Biggest benefit of a kit might be having a pre-programmed AVR micro-controller. I grabbed up this thing to make that easy to program AVRs with the Arduino bootloader. Works like a champ, although I don't think the male/female headers are the best idea - I'd recommend standard male headers (I don't see any need to make the thing stackable).
Regarding the IO Board - I opted to go that route to save space and keep things within the 1U height limit. Doing it this way, 3 will fit in the space of a half rack by my measurements.
I WANT THIS!
Haha I have had a few folks mention that. Glad other folks might be able to get some use out of it! I have had a few inquiries about how to get one of these so here is sort of a summary of what I have come up with:
If you want something now and don't need a rack-format, you can build my predecessor to this called the ShieldBoy. The Eagle layouts are available on the linked page, as well as a bill of materials and some basic information on how to get it up and running.
If you want to buy a ShieldBoy instead, PM me. If enough folks are interested I may look at offering to build these for people.
If you want to build an ArduinoBoy Advance (the rackmount thing), here are the Eagle files for both the top and bottom boards. I don't have a build doc up yet but if you have questions, just reply to this post. Be aware MIDI OUT is untested at this point (but I see now reason why it wouldn't work).
If you want to buy an ArduinoBoy Advance, that stage has not been reached. Still have some things to do before I would be comfortable selling it (at cost or otherwise) in its current state.
For the ABA buyers, I need to know more to see if a kit might be doable while accomplishing everyone's goals so let me know what you want it over, say, the ShieldBoy and what you were going to house it in. I could see a case for the ABA instead of a rack solution by adding some panel mount sockets and drilling out an enclosure, for instance.