Hey folks, its been a while since I've done a good honest entry into the Hackaday prize, I won't bore you with the details just know that I'm back and ready to shine again!  

Lets get thins started with a general overview of the Agricoltura IO system! The System is an RS485 chain and multiple wireless network of connected devices for all sorts of agriculture, farming, and gardening applications. The system is comprised of quite a few hardware devices to cover the areas of wired sensing and wireless sensing, the project description of the page has a comprehensive rundown of the whole damn thing but in this post I am going to be talking about the two projects I'm working on at the beginning. 

To Start things out I am tackling the RS485 side of things with two boards Vine and Ivy, Viny is a general purpose sensing and IO board of which there will be two variants, one will be focused on sensing while the other will support some sensing but also support relay switch and control of higher voltage devices. Ivy is designed to be a development platform with the same brains/power/serial coms as the Viny board but instead of featuring muxing and interfaces for a variety of sensors and devices it will have all the pins of the microcontroller broken out to a large pin header for adding functionality through daughter cards.  What follows is a short rundown of each board followed by a graphical diagram explaining the subsystems of each board and how they are related.

Vine

 Dasiy Chain-able RS485 sensor interface, connectors for Sparkfun QWIIC devices, UART sensors, along with 5V IO for driving relays and other related devices. Designed as a generic general purpose board to support many functions. This ist he RS485 spiritual successor to the SunLeaf platform.

- ST Microelectronics STM32F446RET6 ARM Cortex M4F 180MHZ MCU - 5V Tolerant Analog Inputs - 8x I2C interfaces - 4x UART interface (via mux) - 8x 5V outputs - 8x 5V digital IO ports - USB 2.0 connectivity - RS485 port - 24VAC power input - 2A 3.3V DCDC Regulator, for supporting lots of sensors - 2A 5V DCDC Regulator, for 5V IO and other devices

Ivy 

 Daisy Chain-able RS485 customize-able device. Very similar to Vine almost the same in everyway except instead of having Sparkfun QWIIC conenctors, Ivy will have a single strip header (2.54mm pitch) similar to the Raspberry Pi that will allow for the development of daughter cards for specific functionalities and purposes. Ivy is primarily for the development of new variants of Vine and for customized hardware for functions that are not as common place.

- ST Microelectronics STM32F446RET6 ARM Cortex M4F 168MHZ MCU - 5V Tolerant Analog Inputs - 8x 5V outputs - 4x 5V digital IO ports  - USB 2.0 connectivity  - RS485 port  - 24VAC power input - All MCU Pins broken out to header - Relies on daughter cards for specific functionality  - 2A 3.3V DCDC Regulator, for supporting lots of sensors - 2A 5V DCDC Regulator, for 5V IO and other devices

Stay tuned for more updates on the hardware development side of things, I have been working very hard in secret designing all the circuits in the subsystems of these boards and implementing the first variant of Vine, when thats done, the 2nd variant of Vine will follow then Ivy. I am so excited to keep sharing my progress as I go.

Lets Rock!