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I design Arduino compatible interfaces to the real world... designed around never running out of I/O pins.

I have my own line of Arduino-compatible boards to drive these interfaces, but any off-the-shelf Arduino of any flavor could be used with the appropriate "shield".

The design is not specific to Arduino. I have Raspberry Pi in mind too. I am implementing Arduino first due to pure simplicity. The design goal is such that it could be unplugged from an Arduino, and plugged into a Raspberry Pi, as easily as you could unplug an old-school ascii parallel printer from a DEC PDP-11 and plug it into an IBM-PC.

The whole purpose is to give control of the technology back to the people. I know.. its like replacing Einstein with a ditch digger... but sometimes all you need is getting the ditch dug, and the big guys have big problems if you try to circumvent the technologies they have developed to force you into their business models of continuous revenue streams.

I have been working on this, part time, for ten years now. And went down a lot of paths to dead ends. Unintended limitations. Usually affecting system resilience.

The architectural foundation must be sound, or one will face relentless changes and undue complexity. I have spent a lot of time building proto PCB and exploring how to scale the architecture to accept not only my designs, but how to design the architecture for others to design hardware for it as well, as there is always going to be someone wanting something unique. I have to leave lots of access open for him to assign himself a port number and go for it.

Like the original PC, this is not designed for security. If you have access to the physical system, you *are* God. No questions asked.

But if you only have access to a port, there is little you can do except screw the port up and cause the system to throw error codes through other ports.

I used to work for a major aerospace company...and I built these on the same concepts I would have used on the job. Engineering is what I do, but I am not very good at mass production, marketing, accounting, and the endless minutiae of admistrivia to dealing with people. And I am also too conservative to ask for investment as I knew it would be years before I even got out of the design phase. Now, I see the light at the end or the tunnel, and its either releasing an open-source computer to the world, or an oncoming train. This has been a labor of love for me, like solving crosswords or suduku is for some other people, and sports for others. I am old enough now I am not about to go chasing all over creation looking for an "employment opportunity"..

The guy I have been working with for over 10 years now is closing up his shop, I have been developing my stuff there, and we had a kind of informal agreement... I would share with him any guidance I had on his designs, and he let me use the shop ( kinda like a "maker" shop ) rent-free. Being retired, I really did not need to be paid... this was simply something I wanted to do. Well, he is going to be leaving Southern California for Denver ( result of an inheritance ) and next week I will no longer have access to his lab, or his high speed internet, so I will not be posting near as lengthy of stuff on these forums for a while. It may well take me years to reconstruct the physical architecture I need to do this stuff at my house. So, this ripple-down effect basically freezes my progress on this, and stoppage due to end of life for me is now the likely ending. The guy I was working with has his own projects and life, and has his own animals to feed, just as I am driven to feed mine, and I am just grateful for the time we got to spend together.

I just wish companies weren't so quarterly-profit driven that anything that does not have immediate ROI is not employable.

So, whatever I get mixed up in, its gotta be local to me because I am not going to go through all that trouble and expense of moving again. And quite frankly I hate commuting in rush hour traffic. Right now, I walk to work.

I know.... this post turned out to be a lot lengthier than I intended. Probably should have put it as a journal entry.

I will cut and paste and see.