Today I finished my first printed circuit board design, it’s a prototyping PCB for use inside the prototyping modules. It will allow users to quickly add shift registers, (de)multiplexers and other components to the modules. The circuit has room for 4 x 26 pin headers or IDC connectors to easily connect wires or flatcable for the DB25 connectors. Every pin of the dual row IDC header is routed to a 21 pin single row header and 2 x 6 pads for V++ and GND connections. There is enough space to place up to four 20 pins IC’s and I added a bunch of pre-connected pads and rows so common connections between components can be made quickly.

The design is based on the idea that every Arduino pin can be mapped to a DB25 connector (which are used to attach the modules together). Users can selectively hook up a couple of wires to the Proto-PCB, depending on the functionality of that particular module. I’m currently working on documentation and drawings that explain a bit more about connecting the modules together, more on that subject soon…

I’m learning how to work with KiCad PCB suite, an open source EDA application. Designing this Proto-PCB was a nice exercise to learn KiCad’s common functions and the software to design the circuits: PCBNew. All KiCad files will be released under an open source licence as soon as I have verified the finished PCB’s.

I posted a .zip file with all board-layers as PNG to the forum. Courtesy of Circuitpeople.com, an online service to view and share your Gerber files. I used these PNG’s to create the preview image shown above. Let me know if you miss important features…

It took some time to get everything up and running, but it’s finally here: Machinecollective.org! The site is currently in public beta state as there are still some parts that need attention.

Our final prototypes will be produced this week and our website is almost completely done. Our prototyping modules will be available early september, when the webshop is ready for business. In the meantime we would like everyone to sign up for our forum and start discussing their projects, plans and requirements.

The picture above shows our final prototypes. We made the sides from thin laser-cut acrylic so it’s easy to see if everything fits. The side panels of the final prototyping modules will be made from a high tech aluminum sandwich material which is also thin but much stronger than acrylic. The picture above shows a few different configurations, which are, from left to right:

• - Rotarypot 16 - 16 x panel mount 10K rotary potentiometers
• - 4.5″ LCD - for pal/ntsc video signals
• - Monome 10h - for monome keypad kits
• - Slidepot 16 - 16 x 10k slide potentiometer with 30mm travel
• - Spark 16 - for Sparkfun silicone keypads with support for RGB leds
• - Slidepot 6 - 6 x 10k slide potentiometer with 70mm travel
• - Patchbay 25 - 25 x High quality banana jacks, can double as body contacts
• - Toggle 16 - 16 x panel mount SPDT toggle switch
• - Rotarypot 4 - 4 x panel mount 10K rotary potentiometers

We have created several dedicated pages and wiki sections for our products and services:
Read all about the prototyping modules at their product page or in the Machinecollective wiki.

Our faceplate and acrylic parts manufacturing service will be available as soon as our webshop is launched, you can read more about it at the faceplates page and in our wiki.

Please let us know if you encounter bugs or if some parts need extra clarification.

First things first!
I’d like to thank the webloggers, communities and companies who wrote about us, linked to us and sent loads of traffic to the temporary Machinecollective page (sorry for those lousy pictures by the way). I wouldn’t have thought that the prototyping modules could become such a hot topic. On the other hand it proves that I’m not the only person who’s looking for an evolved version of a breadboard, a nice looking and flexible project enclosure or a quick modular solution for physical interface/controller development.

So what’s Machinecollective all about?
Machinecollective is about physical computing, hardware prototyping, (remote) personal manufacturing, human/machine interaction and control surface development. Machinecollective is you, me and the machines, connected through this online community. Machinecollective is a public experiment, with community driven open source hardware as a foundation for further exploration and development.

People can discuss their projects in the forums, post drawings, schematics and project logs to the wiki and they can soon buy common parts and components through our webshop. We also offer an on-demand manufacturing service for laser-cut acrylic parts and faceplates.

Coming soon
Some parts of the Machinecollective site and the webshop will be further developed over the next few weeks. We’re currently sourcing quality parts & components and optimizing our prototypes for production. There are some cross browser CSS issues that need to be fixed and there are probably some problems that were overlooked or haven’t even been discovered yet, so please report any bugs and/or problems in the forum. We’d love to hear about your plans and projects, so sign up for an account and join the community!