Hello all,
For those of us that are having at the heart of our astronomical setup a RaspberryPi it has been for long now an idea to be able to centralize some critical monitoring and control functionality rather than having extra boards and equipment around. Power boxes are great, and they come in various flavors from many companies on the market. Unfortunately they are either lacking functionality, are expensive for what they are or simply are not open source enough for my taste. That's why I decided to spend some time and design a RaspeberryPi 4 compatible hat that includes the following functionality:
- 4x 12V switchable outputs @3A each
- 2x 12V PWM switchable outputs @3A each
- 1 adjustable 6-12 V output @3A
- Current and fault monitoring for each channel individually
- Temperature, Humidity and Pressure sensor port (for an external readily available module)
- Automotive grade electronics and design (to ensure reliability on all environments
Everything seems to fit nicely on a RPi hat form factor. Attached are some renderings of the design so far.
I designed everything on KiCad and the board designs are released as open source hardware (CERN-OHL) at this repository:
gitlab.com/pierros/astrohat
I am posting this here with the intention to solicit feedback and potential contributions to my effort.
The design can be considered complete for v1.0 and I plan to order some boards soon for testing and software development. I envision a daemon running locally on the RPi and an indi driver to communicate with it.
How does the feature set seem to people? Anything obvious missing?
Would people be interested in a small production run?
Once the first boards arrive and I can verify functionality and placement of ports, I plan to also design a case (probably an aluminum enclosure for the Hat together with the RPi).
Any ideas, feedback, comments are highly welcome!
ps. as a side note, I would really like to see more open hardware projects in the domain of astronomy (amateur or not) and see a flourishing community around them.