The previous board seemed a bit large to us, so we designed a more compact PCB with the inputs and outputs we were planning for our future software, allowing a more efficient assembly without so much wasted space.
After a long design period and a looooong wait, they have finally arrived. Here are the very first pictures.
As you can see, everything is very compact. Apart from the GPS, it accepts an external GPS input, or the on-board one can be used externally.
The NMEA output works provisionally, and we are still testing to output the speed log and GPS data (it isn’t soldered in the photos).
We have kept the SDA and SCL outputs (I2C bus) to connect a 2- or 4-line LCD display, although these screens are very small and the information has to be squeezed a lot, which looks odd; we’ll try to solve this.
The temperature input, although connected and working, may not be available in future versions, as we will use a more flexible system: the I2C bus.
Now it’s time to design an enclosure for the device, but we’ll leave that for another post.
Interested? sailoQ devices are available in the shop: the sailoQ cube-micro, speed log only, and the sailoQ cube-lite, with NMEA 0183 and SeaTalk. If you're unsure which model to choose, see Which sailoQ do I need?