It feels like a rite of passage to make a PCB ruler, but I wonder if this is actually a product. This ruler has a SAM L22 just like Sensor Watch, with a 16-button touch matrix and an Oddly Specific LCD that can display five digits and some indicators. Plus five GPIO’s and I²C pins exposed on an edge connector. I made this to throw in my soldering go-bag, but I think it could have broader appeal, depending on the software I write for it…
The GPIO pinout. Three analog inputs and two digital IO, plus an I²C bus with onboard 3.3k pull-ups, 3.3V regulated power and 4-5V from USB or a battery. It uses a keyed board-to-board connector that at one point folks were aiming to use for Debug Edge, but what with me first using it on a ruler, I couldn’t help but call it the Straight Edge Connector. (Here it’s plugged into an add-on board that I can use with a DAP library to flash bootloaders onto my boards, my main use case right now.)
upon further reflection, this isn’t a product, yet. I did the math on the economics of the gadget, and it would have to be twice the price of a PyRuler to cover costs and margins — and even then, the ROI isn’t enough to justify the time and work required to make it worth that price. Still, I’m gonna toss it in my bag and write code here and there for things that need doing; maybe someday it’ll have amassed enough functionality to make sense.
@joeycastillo that's a hard decision to make; I've had several really fun and cool projects that are absolutely not going to be products I make any money on.
