The Problems we are trying to solve.

Before starting any electronic project a maker has to go through an Exhaustive //TODO list

• Prepare a list of right electronics components
• Prepare BOM
• Search them locally or online to fit the BOM
• Wait for the components to arrive if sourced online
• Getting started with prototyping
• Go online again studying libraries and figuring out how they can be interfaced on breadboard or etch a PCB
• Finally start building and actually working on your project and then try not to rage quit

Winkel Board is the solution. The Story Behind.

We were building an IoT product and wanted to experiment with different communication protocols, like radio, WiFi, Bluetooth and found ourselves in a mess while doing so.Well of course we had an Arduino Board to get started with but had to buy and experiment with different shields every time and that costed us a lot of time and money. In India, such shields were really costly to source from outside plus it really affected the speed of prototyping. We talked to a lot of makers and electronic hobbyists and found that this was a common problem within the maker community and not just in India but all over the world. Some suggested RPi 3 can be an answer for many projects but not every project needs an O.S. And not every project can be housed with an Arduino with all its shields, and some projects just require to use many communication protocols at once and need to perform a lot of calculations and I/O operations. To do all these powerful things with just one small board and to keep it simple and Arduino IDE compatible was the idea behind Winkel Board.

So we built the Winkel Board

Winkel Board is a new Arduino Compatible, Powerful Open Source HardWare Platform for makers who work on electronic projects which involve a lot of I/O operations and involves using different communication protocols to fulfill different tasks. Winkel Board is also for engineers and hardware hackers who are looking to build and prototype products of tomorrow, but have to spend time looking for the right components to use and then spend more time figuring out how they can be interfaced together as it requires basic knowledge of various chips and their libraries to get started.

Winkel Board helps you achieve all of the above, so that you don't have to spend time on looking for components and studying their libraries and you can quickly accelerate building and prototyping.

There are several other open hardware platforms which i'll compare later in this article, but most of them fail to provide a single stop solution.

• For example there are times when you would require your Arduino to connect to the internet, but you have to buy an extra Ethernet shield or interface a WiFi chip to it in order to do so.
• You may sometimes want to have accurate times on your controller to fulfill certain tasks at particular intervals, but have to interface an RTC with your controller or read time from the internet for which you will have go to the first point.
• Or maybe you want to create a mesh network using radio nodes but have a hard time figuring out how to get started with NRF24l01 or buy a radio shield for that reason.
• You may also find a need to use Bluetooth in your projects but have spend time interfacing HC-05 with an Arduino or Sometimes you just run out of GPIO pins.

The Winkel boards have everything onboard for a maker to get started with building different prototypes and products of tomorrow.

Here are the on board Feature Set

• A powerful core in the form of ATmega128
• On-board Bluetooth Module in the form of HC-05
• On-board WiFi module in the form of ESP8266 ESP12E
• On-board Real Time Clock in the form of DS3231
• On-board Radio Transceiver in the form of NRF24l01
• OTA programming of Atmega128 and ESP12E (This one is a biggie :) )
• Smart-Opt feature enabling you to use only specific on-board components when needed.
• And all this in a form factor of 5cm x 5cm

Tech Specs, Pinout & Comparison with other solution

Technology

The Winkel Board is a microcontroller...