[Dan Julio]’s gCore (short for Gadget Core) is aimed at making GUI-based portable and rechargeable gadgets much easier to develop. gCore is the result of [Dan]’s own need for a less tiresome way to develop such hardware.
[Dan] found that he seemed to always be hacking a lot of extra circuitry into development boards just to get decent power management and charge control. To solve this, he designed his own common hardware platform for portable gadgets and the gCore was born.
While the color touchscreen is an eye-catching and useful addition, the real star of his design is the power management and charging features. Unlike most development hardware, the gCore intelligently shares load power with charging power. Power on and power off are also all under software control.
Sound intriguing? That’s not all the gCore has to offer, and you can learn more from the project page at hackaday.io (which has a more in-depth discussion of the design decisions and concept.) There are also some additional photos and details on [Dan]’s website.
[Dan] is no stranger to developing hardware. The tcam-mini thermal imager (and much more) is his work, and we have no doubt the gCore’s design and features are informed directly by [Dan]’s actual, practical development needs.
Cool design, let’s see if any of these parts can actually be bought anywhere.. sad truth about projects these days.
Well I know you can’t get the CP2102 or even its successor, CP2102N, but WCH does make a pin compatible chip you can replace it with, though perhaps not with the same features he seemed to configure specifically here. A TI buck-boost also seems (just on gut feeling) probably hard to find, at least other ti power stuff has been scarce. No idea about the MCP charger, I haven’t heard Adafruit run out with theirs but theirs is a simpler model.
Oh, one of the links was to the old feather-compatible version. The new one also has an INA current monitor (almost certainly scarce) and an efm8 coproc (no idea)
Might have to change the name as Geutebruck would have GCore as a trademark.
And here I was thinking that an old Amiga mod called “Comms” (At least on my file system) was the one and only example of gadget core.
Thanks to hackaday for featuring this. Sorry about any confusion between the original feather design and the new single board design. I’m only in process of documenting it and have a repository (so I can share code with beta testers) but haven’t documented it on hackaday.io or my website.
Parts are an issue. This is partly why I haven’t fully documented the project yet. We’ve been finding supplies for some of the parts (including some of those listed by commenters above) but some are still unobtanium. It is possible that I might have to change the design but not quite at that point yet.
Thanks for the added details and context! And regarding part scarcity, it must be a frustrating time for new hardware projects…
Have you been able to find acceptable capacitive touch screens in small form factors?
Few years ago i settled for no touch for my home automation. The resistive ones were horrible, the capacitive were so expensive that i could buy a cheap phone instead. Some notes here https://www.electrobob.com/10002-screens-and-controls/
electrobob – yes from buydisplay.com. They offer long term support for some displays. Unfortunately LCD prices have shot up during the past two years. I guess because of demand for large screens manufacturers have less interest in building the smaller ones.