Teensy breakout board / shield style adapter?

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allenhuffman

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Does anyone make a breakout board that a Teensy 2.0 could run in to for easier access to the pins? I envision something like the Screw Shields for Arduino, where the Teensy could sit on top in header sockets, then run the pins out to small screw terminals. The board could provide some holes for mounting in a case on header.

How do you folks mount your Teensy when you use it in a project?
 
Thanks, JBeale. I guess at $16, having easy-to-replace parts isn't a big deal for a dedicated project. In my case, we were using Arduinos to interface between pressure switches and laser tag sensors at a haunted house attraction. It was crucial that if one of the units died, I could pop open my box and swap out the Arduino.

For experimenting, I don't much like the idea of soldering wires, so I have the Teensy 2.0 with header pins and I have been using female jumper wires to manually hook things up, which works great -- but not good for anything permanent. I guess I am trying to avoid solder connections as much as possible :) due to lack of skill and laziness.

I was hoping someone made a tiny header board with screw terminals, but maybe the Teensy market is much more focused than the general purpose experimenting in the Arduino world.

I am enjoying all of this so much. I wish I had discovered it years earlier.
 
Allen, I think a header board is a great idea. The cost could be relatively low, as long as you're willing to wait a while as iTead, OSH, etc. get around to making and sending the thing. The main question 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.

If a rugged implementation is needed, I'd suggest something like the Ruggeduino with its myriad of resistors, Zener diodes, and other protections built-in to help abate the types of problems that a MCU might encounter in a 'noisy' environment. At the very least, let that design (the schematics are online) guide your approach to a Teensy shield as zener diodes, current-limiting resistors, etc. are cheap and easy to implement. I have been told by others who are more knowledgeable than I that even the Ruggeduino has potential catastrophic failure modes, but I can't say what they are, nor how likely they are to occur.
 
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.
 
I'd like to think that a Teensy could drive a DMX show, no problem, provided it has the right interface. In order to improve it's long-term survivability, I'd consider using opto-isolators for outputs going to high-amp relays. You can use DIP-based opto's they're cheap and easy to swap out. If you want to be fancy, add a Osram 3mA light to each output to give you a hint how bright the current output is. You'd still have to implement a DMX controller, but there are multiple designs out there that you can emulate on your breakout board - just verify they work before soldering that board together. HTH
 
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