however, is the premise of needing to swap out an Arduino... that suggests to me that something went very very wrong in the design phase. Swapping out controllers seems like an invitation for more of the same, until the source of the fault is identified.
Agreed. But you've obviously never seen how I solder! As a hobbyist who has zero background in electronics, problems in the design phase are highly probable
I just believe in redundancy and repairability when possible. Having had enough properly designed electronics fail on me over the years (power surges, lightning strikes, hard drives crashing, someone spilling coffee on something), I have learned to have backups of anything important. None of my home brew gadgets have failed yet (YET!), but we've certainly had to swap out fog machines, sound cards and other items that have died during active operation (and I've had some of my screw terminal wires come lose causing half of the pressure mats in a haunted house to stop responding).
When I first built prop controllers for them in 2005, I took Parallax/EFX-TEK BasicStamp Prop-1 boards and built multiple identical units, so if one fried (or, as likely, some kid working the haunted house went poking around where they shouldn't be and spilled a drink he shouldn't have had on them, or trippeed on cables he shouldn't have been near, etc.), I could hot swap out the box and let the show go on. The worst failure was some chip that fried, but I had ordered spares (and spare solid state relays and such). Just in case.
I love the idea of something as low cost as a Teensy being able to be plugged/replaced. The Prop-1 from EFX-TEK was more industrial with screw terminals and such already on it, but at a much higher cost and far more limited. Looking in to markets like that, a similar form factor board that the Teensy plugged in to might hit a nice niche market. I see so many uses for these things!
But I can't fix our biggest issue. We evaluated a high end DMX/show control software package running on Windows this year and had all kinds of problems with that. We had three identical laptops so we could swap them out in case one died (cheap PCs), but our nemesis turned out to be S.W.T.s (Strange Windows Things)
Thanks for the reply! I look forward to learning much as I get further in to this. I am a software guy since starting on the 8-bit machines back around 1982, but beyond building RS232 cables and such, my electronics knowledge is very limited.