Concept Flashback – Butterfly Board AIO Logger
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.
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.
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.