History of Norduino

I really love to play with Jeenodes and the Arduino FIO for prototyping wireless sensors. This is an essential task in my daily development process for my company Robomotic ltd.

However I was not satisfied by the various projects for instance:

the Jeenodes are quite good but the RFM12b has limited meshing capabilities
the Arduino FIO is good but the Digimark Xbee are in the high range of RF transmitters
the various Arduino shields are too big for me needs

So I needed something small with a modular socket for plugging sensors and with a cute chip for sensor networks.
Because I was playing with Nordic chips, one morning I woke up and I thought: “o my god it will be awesome to have a Jeenode that uses one of the Nordic chip series”.
And I did, prototype after prototype I was satisfied and then decided to give it to the people and not just sitting in my lab!

Let’s see now some pictures of the first prototypes!

Norduino 0.1

The first prototype was running on a Jeenode without the RFM12B with the SPI socket connected to the nRFL24L01 module.
This was good to test the Arduino library and to design the pcb for the next version

Norduino 0.2

This was a classical epic fail! I sent the wrong Eagle files to this guys and so I got what a deserved a bunch of un-routed boards!

Norduino 0.3

Then I decided to make a small breakout board to convert a jeenode to a norduino.

The pcb are available in the shop as well as the nordic nrfl24l01 chip.
It is not the best solution as you can see the space and alignment are not great but they do the job
if you have already a Jeenode. You can order the Jeenode without the RF module if you plan to use only Nordic 2.4GHz transmission.