Bigdot

librelab::Big Dot

A SAML21-based board kit for your environmental sensing projects!

Description

In this repository you will find the design and firmware files for librelab::Big Dot, our libre hardware kit for low-energy LoRa applications. The content in this repo is organized in the following way:

├── arduino-core (support files)
├── board (main board design)
├── board-ext (extension board design)
├── bootloader (firmware files)
├── docs (user documentation)
└── examples (applications)

Installation

Arduino support

To install the support files for librelab::Big Dot on Arduino, just include the following line in the field 'Additional Boards Manager URL' (under 'Preferences' menu) of your Arduino IDE:

https://unixjazz.org/pub/software/package_librelab_index.json

We are using the Arduino SAMD core (v1.6), but forked and modified by MattairTech to add support for the chip SAML21. You will need Arduino 1.8.13 or superior to use this core with our board.

This core has been tested on Linux (64-bit), Windows 10, and Mac OS 10.15 (64-bit only). If you need further instructions on how to install the Arduino core, follow this link.

RIOT-OS support

If Arduino is not suitable for your project, you can use better alternatives. All the paths lead to the same destination (when it comes to our finitude as species), but some are more direct than others. You may want to use RIOT-OS! Our board is supported and the support can be found here.

To use RIOT-OS with librelab::Big Dot, just pass its name to make:

$ BOARD=bigdot make all

If you are new to RIOT-OS, make sure to follow the tutorials.

Prototyping

If you do not have a Big Dot at hand, you can use a SAML21 Xplained board for testing purposes. The information on how to flash the bootloader we use can be found in the bootloader directory. For your convenience, we also included pre-compiled firmware files in this repository as well.

We recommend the usage of the UF2 bootloader included in the bootloaders directory: bigdot-uf2.bin.

Project info

Big Dot was developed at librelab, School of Data Science (UVA) with funding from the "Network Public Spaces" (NPS) project between 2020-2021. Since then, it has been run as an independent project by Open Hardware enthusiasts.

License

All the documentation is released as CC-BY-4.0-International. All the hardware code is released under CERN-OHL-v2 Strongly Reciprocal. All software code is released under GPL v3, unless marked otherwise on the source file headers. See LICENSE and AUTHORS files for further information.

Big Dot is Open Source Hardware-certified.

Happy hw hacking!