I have been very busy with version 3.2 because I entered RCKid into the Device Prototyping summer school organized by the University of Lancaster (LINK). And while I have the feeling that I should have done this some 3 years ago, it was absolutely amazing and if you have a project you want to prototype, I highly recommend going in the coming years! The event is organized by https://prosquared.org/ where you should find more.

First and foremost, you meet great people from all embedded walks of life, and they will have interesting comments about your device. For me this was the first time I talked about my device to others in person, and words cannot describe how cool it is:)

The days are also filled with lectures and tutorials on various aspects of device creation and prototyping - technical, deeply technical, administrative, research-y. This year they covered things from how to solder (unsurprisingly I have failed that one:), SMT parts, creating devices simply and cheaply (two separate talks:), the evils and importance of certification (I still have nightmares about this), very cool tricks you can do with MCUs and LEDs (I will be using those in RCkid's next revision), and some cool HCI projects. It's pretty packed so I am sure I forgot some, but the point is that there is something for everyone, and even the talks where I thought I know stuff already are good to attend as the presenters are real professionals who often give things in context & perspective.

The projects submitted range from ideas on paper to almost finished like rckid and the judges select a few good projects to give brief presentations and win some money (yay for rckid:), then all attendees vote for a project they like the most (yay for someone else:). (consolation price: quite a few people told me they really liked rckid and voted for it, if you are reading this and are one of those, thank you, it means a world to me!)

The whole affair is organized by people deeply involved with the BBC:microbit and one of them, Steve Hodges, gave me a Jacdac starter kit under promise I will do something with it. And since for RCkid, everything is a cartridge away, I was pretty busy in the past few weeks with the Jacdac cartridge for RCKid, ta da:

Its very cool how little is needed to make it work - the cartridge supports dual mode - RCkid can be either a service and provide peripherals it has such as accelerometer, buttons, rumblers, LEDs, etc., or it can be a brain (controller in Jacdac terms), in which case other devices are connected to it and the cartridge provides Jacdac bus with power as well (hence the extra circuitry).

Software-wise Jacdac protocol is essentially an UART with extra tweaks over a single wire and this is rather easy and fun to program on RP2350 in PIO. So a few evenings after the board has arrived, I have RCKid expose its accelerometer as a Jacdac service.

The Jacdac connector requires cartridge board thickness to be 1.6mm which in the long run is probably better for RCKid as well, as the standard width boards are ubiquitous and cheapest to manufacture, will likely work better with my plans for cartridge connector I will use if I ever create larger numbers of RCKid (simpler assembly, better electrical characteristics and tolerances, but requires custom stamped part), and overall the 0.4mm in extra space in the cartridge is probably not worth it anyways.

But it means new version for the case & connector to accommodate the thicker pcb. I am also thinking how to actually make use of Jacdac in RCKid and I have a few ideas, so as always, stay tuned:)