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Electronics prototyping platform

evive is the ultimate open-source prototyping platform any maker would need. Its made for all age groups to serve a wide range of applications. Besides helping hobbyists and students in building their projects and experimental setups, it can be used by beginners to develop their making skills and by advanced users like researchers, professionals and educators to analyze and debug their projects. With Arduino MEGA at its heart, it offers a novel way of interacting with your hardware using it's menu based visual interface. The accurate current & voltage sensing capabilities let you collect and analyze data from your projects. The whole world of Internet of Things, with power supplies and support for sensors & actuators is available in one small portable unit. It saves your time and allows you to be more creative and innovative. Explore more at: http://evive.cc

Step 1: evive: an all-in-one STEM learning cum prototyping "tablet"

evive is an opensource prototyping platform. With Arduino MEGA at its heart, it offers a novel way of interacting with your hardware using it's menu based visual interface. The accurate current & voltage sensing capabilities let you collect and analyze data from your projects. The whole world of Internet of Things, with power supplies and support for sensors & actuators is available in one small portable unit. This all-in-one kit saves your time and allows you to be more creative and innovative. Its just like a maker's tablet. Explore more at http://igg.me/at/evive.

Step 2: evive's features

evive serve as an all-in-one kit for learning, building and debugging interactive programming, electronics, embedded and robotics projects. It uses Arduino MEGAas micro controller with lots of commonly needed hardware to simplify the art of making. It can be used as a Voltmeter or Ammeter as it has isolated ADCs working upto -+30V range and -+3A with resolution of millivolt and milliampere respectively. It can also be used as mini oscilloscope. It has reverse polarity, overcurrent and over voltage protections. Evive is loaded with lots of features as shown in image below. This video explains the features in detail: click here.

Step 3: Fabrication

For assembly of SMD and TH components during the prototyping phase and small batch production, we have done it by hand soldering. We were advised to use components bigger than 0805 for resisters/capacitors, but based on package availability of ICs, we have to go to very low footprint size like 3 mm x 3 mm x 0.65 mm 20 lead QFN package (8mil distance between pads (edge to edge)), but surely we should avoid using QFN packages for hand soldering.

For PCB prototyping, we have selected PCBway as there reviews were very good. The attached images shows the very good quality PCB delivered to us in 8 days via DHL shipping. It was very well packed in vacuum sealed bubble wrap.

The quality seems to also very good for even 0.4mm pitch QFN sized components.

Step 4: Case Fabrication

There are three parts of casing:

Bottom Case

Top Case

Lid (We call it magic lid)

All the CAD files are available opensource at: https://grabcad.com/library/evive-case-1

For prototyping of evive, we have used 3D printing using PLA material with Chinese version of Prusa i3 printer.

The printer was performing beyond our expectation. Its really very cheap (just 250USD) and good quality. The least thickness of casing is 1.5mm and the printed part is of good strength. We tested it even by dropping with jerk. The tolerances were also very less (~0.5mm). For getting polished finish on the base side, we used Kapton Tape. The design is according to plastic injection molding and will do that during mass manufactuing.

The following are the printed parts.

The text on surface is printed from local carpenter cum studio shop using screen printing. Screen printing is the same process as used for printing on T-shirts. Also we tried to do that using the EZ screen printing kit, but of-course the professional person was much better. Also the advantage of using Kapton tape to get polished like surface helped us to get better screen print.

After the form and features are finalized, we use SLS technology of 3D printing as it has very good geometric tolerance and quality finish. And then we gave it for Plastic Injection Molding.