Hey Folks!!!

So its the end of the summer and the entries for the Hackaday Prize 2020 close tomorrow morning. First I'd like to thank the community for voting this project into the Top 20 for the $500 seed funding round! My main goal at the start of the project was to hit that mark before pushing forward, so thanks again for all the support!

Moving on I haven't done as much work on the project this past month as I hoped, my day job (senior engineer at one startup, principle engineer at another ugh) work was in crunch mode and we had to find some bugs in prototypes/do a few more spins to get things right. Now the hardware I'm designing at work is functional and in production I can turn my head back to this project.

First off there have been some changes to the Vine boards, originally they were going to take 24VAC but now they are going to take 24VDC as input so I can run them off solar rechargeable batter packs, 24VDC is only the max input so that should give me some flexibility in what battery packs I want to use/charge. I do plan to develop 24VAC versions at a later date for but right now I am focusing on running these off solar power so they can be placed out doors with the only the RS485 wires needing to be run.  Some other changes have been spacing the QWIIC connectors apart more and adding TVS diodes to the circuit, also the labeling of the board has been updated to look nicer. 

The motherboard is now in the routing phase, it was a month ago but there were some issues, I have since cleared up the schematic errors and now have all the parts in the PCB with the correct netlists. I have also finalized the shape of the motherboard to be the same size and shape as the Vine boards, only the motherboard is a Beaglebone Green Gateway cape so it has cutouts for the BBG connectors.

Now on to licensing, as for the licensing of the software its going to be released GPL V3 and the hardware will be CERN-OHL-S when I am ready to release the sources for everything. With this project I am waiting until I have working hardware revisions before releasing anything so that my contribution to the community at large will be of a much higher quality than what i am known for.

Thanks for reading the update there will be more exciting posts in the future!