Centipede Shield Design Contest

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Our friend [Garrett Mace] from macetech has finished a prototype of a new shield which allows the Arduino (or any other microcontroller with I2C) to add 64 digital I/O pins using only 2 of the analog pins. Currently he only has a few pre-production boards, and rather than selling them he is throwing a contest to win them. The contest is looking for people who have a specific project in mind that could use the centipede, and on Friday November 13th he will pick his favorite two. To submit an idea, just head over the Arduino forums and post an idea complete with details and relevant schematics, etc.

We will be sure to follow up with the winners of the contest, as well as let you all know when the Centipede Shield makes it into production.

19 thoughts on “Centipede Shield Design Contest

  1. why would her use Microhips mcp23017 (other that to get free chips as samples, cos its really HARD do buy them in small numbers) instead of more popular PCF8575C?

    damn I feel old, I remember doing similar thing for my C64 with 8255

  2. Ok my bad. They are available if you are willing to order one IC for $1 and pay $5 for postage.

    I was thinking “in a brick and mortar shop” … or in Europe. Yes, we still have those.
    I love Microchip when it comes to samples and occasional PIC 16, but trying to buy something else from them is a mayor PITA.

    Crap, we have a big Electronics market in Warsaw, probably biggest in Europe.
    http://www.wolumen.com.pl/index.php?page=infogielda&sh=0
    http://maps.google.pl/maps/mm?client=opera&q=20.93889,52.285816&oe=utf-8&ie=UTF8&hl=en&ll=52.285422,20.939051&spn=0.006386,0.013078&t=h&z=17

    Thats 200 Electronics shops (tents :P) one next to the other big. Thats like a mini version of Shenzhen electronic market (size of one SEG floor). You wont find anything from Microchip other than PICs there.

  3. Yeah the heart of this project is just how cool the MCP23017 is. Cheap, gives you 16 I/O that are as capable as normal uC I/O. The Centipede Shield is just a handy way to get four of them on a small board. It seems so useful, but I couldn’t think of any project that needed 64 I/O, so I had the idea for the contest.

  4. Ok my bad. They are available if you are willing to order one IC for $1 and pay $5 for postage.

    I was thinking “in a brick and mortar shop” … or in Europe. Yes, we still have those.
    I love Microchip when it comes to samples and occasional PIC 16, but trying to buy something else from them is a mayor PITA.

    Crap, we have a big Electronics market in Warsaw (open air + surrounding shops), probably biggest in Europe.
    http://maps.google.pl/maps/mm?client=opera&q=20.93889,52.285816&oe=utf-8&ie=UTF8&hl=en&t=h&ll=52.285609,20.938721&spn=0.001596,0.00327&z=19

    Thats 200 Electronics shops one next to the other big. Thats like a mini version of Shenzhen electronic market (size of one SEG floor). You wont find anything from Microchip other than PICs there.

  5. It would be more interesting to use the I2C and a breakout to have massive amounts of analogue inputs for sensor arrays. They mention a muxxer that does this in the comments.

    64 analogue inputs would be nice for temperature array monitoring.

  6. @rasz
    “Ok my bad. They are available if you are willing to order one IC for $1 and pay $5 for postage.”

    like there is other option for any other component. If you have electronic parts supplier locally you extremely lucky. For most US there is only RatShack and they already add extra 5 for any part :(

  7. I can be biased as I can always jump into subway and have 200 shops to chose from in 10 minutes, but Microchip being a pain when it comes to availability is not something I imagined in my head :). For example Dave from EEVblog said few times that its the same (or worse) in Australia where they cant even get bulk orders in reasonable time. If Microchip ignores bulk clients something is very wrong.

  8. @mj:

    If you need to monitor a lot of temperatures you might want to look at the Maxim-Dallas 1-wire remote temp sensors like the DS1822-PAR. You can multi-drop them on just two wires. They’re kind of expensive compared to a handful of thermistors or insert-your-favorite-temp-sense-diode-junction-here, but they’re factory calibrated and easy to wire.

  9. I know this is not the right place for this but I figured someone might know what i’m on about here. I am wondering about an easy way to get alpha channels on modern serial controlled pll cb’s such as the BU2630F E-2 without reprogramming the eprom. What would be needed to make a parallel breakout board that I could wire to the 3 pll lines da ce cl so I could pull high or low the 10khz pin like the old pll02a mods?

  10. “which allows the Arduino (or any other microcontroller with I2C) to add 64 digital I/O pins”

    Not likely, this “shield” has the stupid Arduino gap that won’t fit anything that has standard 0.1″ spacing.

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