It has been awfully quiet on the public front here for sure, but I have been working on quite a bit of things behind the scenes here at Etherkit Galactic HQ. It’s been a challenging year since I last wrote about the personal things going on here, but things have been going reasonable well after a rough half-year immediately following that post. I’m just about ready to attempt to revamp Etherkit, however there are still a few challenging roadblocks to overcome, and I could use a bit of guidance.

The most difficult issue is trying to re-bootstrap the business financially. I’m currently only selling the Si5351A Breakout Board, which obviously isn’t enough to expand a business upon. The possibility of a capital infusion unfortunately broke down, and so the only practical way forward at this point is most likely another crowdfunding campaign.

As mentioned in the opening paragraph, I have been working on various projects, and so I do have some candidates. Many of the projects that are in the works or only even in the planning stages require the use of a microcontroller, and so last year I decided to make my own Arduino-compatible microcontroller board family which I can then use as the heart of many of these products. I’ve taken a real liking to the Arduino Zero because of its speed and features, but the cost is fairly high and the standard Arduino form factor isn’t great for many purposes. Therefore, I have decided to make a new standalone board derived from the Zero which I call Empyrean, and you can see in the photo at the top of the post. It comes in two flavors: Alpha and Beta. The Alpha is based on the Atmel ATSAMD21G18A microcontroller, same as the Arduino Zero. The Beta uses a controller (ATSAMD21G16B) with a bit less flash and RAM than the Zero (but still more than an Arduino Uno), but is also priced similarly to the ATmega328 line of microcontrollers. Both come on a small board similar in size to the Nano and has nearly all of the same circuitry of the Arduino Zero except for the EDBG support.

It is true that there are a flood of Arduino clones out there and this makes entering the market with another one somewhat crazy. My value proposition for Empyrean is based on the confluence of breadboard-friendly form factor along with a wallet-friendly price. My target price point is around $15 for Alpha and $10 for Beta. While that is a fair bit more than your typical eBay Nano clone, Empyrean would also be quite a bit more powerful than a Nano, in both clock speed and available memory. So my question to you, dear reader, is whether you would be interested enough in this product to back a crowdfunding campaign in order to have it made? I do plan to make a serious push on a radio soon, but it would be nice to ramp up the business before that, while also solidifying the microcontroller platform that will be used in future products. Let me know what you think in the comments, or send me an email.

In the mean time, I thought I’d let you know that I’m working on a Rev D board spin of the Si5351A Breakout Board. You can see a prototype in beautiful OSHPark purple above. The most significant changes in this revision will be to change the coupling of the reference oscillator to the Si5351 XA input pin to meet datasheet specs and to panelize the board in preparation for future pick-and-place operations (they are currently hand-assembled!).

Perhaps even more interesting is that I also hope to be able to soon offer a frequency calibration report with every board sold. Thanks to LA3PNA, I am now in possession of a decent 10 MHz GPSDO to use as a lab reference, which will allow me to measure the frequency correction value accurately enough for hobbyist usage. I now have a small printer on hand, and so now what I need to do is add new code to my board test script to measure the correction value and print it for inclusion with each board sold. Stay tuned for notification when I’m ready to go live with this; hopefully soon.

Let me reiterate: I’d love to hear your thoughts about the above proposals. I’m interested in serving the needs of my customers. Thank you!