SODAQ
Connect Anything Anywhere
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are some questions we often get asked about the design of the SODAQ board
Grove?
We have chosen grove connectors for its easy way of connecting sensors, actuators and other modules. Grove is also the cheapest and most complete modular connection system for Arduino and compatibles
Why is one row of Grove connectors switched?
We have chosen to have one row of Grove connectors power switched in software. Often you want a sensor only to be on at certain regular intervals. So why waste power? With one row of switched connectors, we can just use one pin on the microcontroller to switch all of these sensors on and off at once.
Why not Leonardo?
We built our first prototype using the same processor as the Leonardo (the Atmega 32U4) only to find out that its bootloader gives more trouble than it's worth.
We want the rock solid reliablility that the Arduino Uno has and we have learned that the 328P is a much better choice.
Why no SD Card?
True, SD cards can hold much more data than a flash module. Our experience in the field shows us however that SD cards are often the weakest link in an embedded system. The fragile contacts can cause connectivity problems and bring your whole data logger down.
But probably even more important is the memory and program space the SD FAT filesystem requires. Many Arduino projects fail because the more complicated sketches no longer fit in program memory.
This is mostly due to the use of SD cards and the FAT filesystem.
Writing to serial flash is much lighter and thus more advanced embedded applications can be made using serial flash for storage.