Concept Flashback – Butterfly Board AIO Logger

By Nulltek

I recently redesigned my in-home server setup, and during that ordeal I stumbled upon an a cool little design I was working on in 2016.

The concept was to solve a problem I had at the time, when I was working with a lot of prototype-sensing technologies. Whenever I needed to do any form of long term logging, I’d have to commit a separate computer running scripts that were tagged up to a micro-controller/ADC. My other option was to write a bunch of unique code to set up a dedicated logging system, and its just a mighty pain/resource constraint. So I decided to have a peak around for something that did this in a AIO package, so I could avoid the hassle and just pick up one or two dedicated units (I was logging stuff a lot). All this equipment was very expensive (~400+) for a young professional on university research contracts, and most of this prexisting stuff almost never allowed for autonomous operation/network connectivity.

So I figured, you know what? I needed a little project to to keep my hobby going, and knowing that completing this was a massive undertaking for one person, I sort of knew it would stay as a concept. I developed the initial idea that would suit my needs, and figured out what it would take for me to produce something of the likeness.

The first quick mock up, just to kind of give myself an idea of layout.

I spent some time sketching out concepts and system architectures, and then went on to mock up a quick 3D layout of high level parts. After a wee bit of work I’d come up with an initial design concept, I was not entirely happy with the outcome so I went back to flesh out the concept further. This is the model I came up with.

Final Concept Model for the Butterfly Board
Exploded view of developed concept
Showing USB power/Regulated power socket + Hardware data over USB.

Shortly after I designed this concept, I transitioned from research into a permanent position at 4RF, and so I never got the chance bring the concept to life. However, to this day I still find myself in need of this system, so maybe I’ll resurrect the source at some stage.